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EDITED BY 

FREDERICK H. SYKES, Ph.D. 

TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



THOMAS CAELYLE 
BUENS 



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Robert Burns 

From a copyrighted photograph by Hollyer of the painting by Nasmyth 



Zbe Sctfbner En^lieb Classics 



THOMAS CARLYLE 



ESSAY ON BURNS 



EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 

BY 

ARCHIBALD MaoMECHAN, Ph.D. 

GEORGE MUNRO PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE 

AND LITERATURE IN DALHOUSIE COLLEGE, 

EDITOR OF "SARTOR RESARTUS " AND 

" HEROES AND HERO WORSHIP." 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1908 



LIBRARY of CO* 
Iwo Copies net 

MAR 21 vm 

I COHY a. 




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3L. 



Copyright, 1908, by 
Chaeles Scribnee's Sons 




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CONTENTS 



PAGE 

BIBLIOGRAPHY iv 

INTRODUCTION: 

i. Thomas Carlyle • . v 

li. Carlyle's "Burns" xii 

TEXT. Carlyle's Essay on Burns 3 

NOTES 65 

APPENDIXES: 

i. On the Study op Carlyle's " Burns" .... 93 

ii. Carlyle's Summary of the Essay 97 

in. Poems by Robert Burns . . * 100 

INDEX 109 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

BURNS 

Editions : 

"Life and Works." Edited by R. Chambers. 4 vols., Lon- 
don and New York, 1896. (Best combined Life and Works . ) 

" Poems, Songs and Letters," Edited by Alexander Smith. 
1 vol., 1893. The "Globe" edition. 

"Complete Poetical Works." The "Cambridge" edition. 
A reprint of the "Centenary" edition of Burns, edited by 
Henley and Henderson. 4 vols., Edinburgh, 1896-7. 

"Selections from the Poems of Robert Burns." Edited by 
John G. Dow. 

Criticism : 

Carlyle, T., " Miscellaneous Essays," "Burns." 

Emerson, R. W., "Speech at the Burns Centenary," 1859. 

Works, vol. xi, pp. 303-8. 
Hazlitt, W., "Lectures on the English Poets," pp. 245-282. 
Kingsley, C, " Burns and His School." Works, vol. xx. 
Shairp, J. C, " Poetic Interpretation of Nature," pp. 213- 

219, and " Aspects of Poetry," pp. 192-226. 
Stevenson, R. L., " Familiar Studies of Men and Books." 

CARLYLE 
Editions : 

The " Centenary " edition. 30 vols., Chapman and Hall. 
The " People's" edition. 37 vols., Chapman and Hall. 

Life: 

" Carlyle's Early Life." By J. A. Froude. 2 vols. 
" Carlyle 7 s Life in London." By J. A. Froude. 2 vols. 1 
" Life of Carlyle." ByR. Garnett ( " Great Writers " Series). 
1 'Thomas Carlyle,". by Leslie Stephen in "The Dictionary 
of National Biography." 

Criticism : 

Arnold, M., " Discourses in America," " Emerson and Car- 
lyle," pp. 138-207. 

Birrell, A., "Obiter Dicta," "Carlyle," pp. 1-54. 

Harrison, F., "The Choice of Books," "Froude's Life of 
Carlyle," pp. 175-199. 

Masson, D., " Carlyle Personally and in His Writings." 
London, 1885. 

Morley, John, "Critical Miscellanies," vol. I, pp. 96-248. 

Thoreau, Henry, "A Yankee in Canada," pp. 211-247. 

Lowell, J. R., "Literary Essays," vol. u, pp. 77-120. 

l Froude Is indispensable.but not trustworthy. His work should always 
be checked by reference to Prof. Norton's editions of Carlyle's "Letters." 

iv 



INTRODUCTION 

THOMAS CARLYLE 
I 

THOMAS CARLYLE died in 1881, in the eighty-sixth 
year of his age, only the other day, it seems; but he 
was born in 1795, in the last decade of the eighteenth cent- 
ury, and he was a young man, of twenty, who had finished 
with school and college, when Waterloo was fought and 
won. The ambitious and gifted son of a dour Scottish 
stone-mason with that respect for learning which runs in 
Scottish blood, he received as sound an education as his 
country could give him, but, at the end, he found himself 
unable to enter any of the recognized professions. For a 
time he was a tutor and a schoolmaster— a man with no 
recognized calling. He drifted into literature, the craft 
for which he was born, but he had a long apprenticeship 
to serve before he won to due recognition as a master. 
In 1820, he took up the study of German and found 
spiritual deliverance in the ethics of "Wilhelm Meister." 
It was through Carlyle and Coleridge that German 
thought began to influence English literature and life. 
Carlyle translated works of Goethe, Richter, Tieck, Hoff- 
mann and Musaeus; and his detached essays on the differ- 
ent writers almost form a connected outline history of 
German literature. In 1826 he married Jane Baillie Welsh, 
a lineal descendant of John Knox, a woman of great 
originality and strong character. Their relations as hus- 
band and wife have been greatly misunderstood; these 
were essentially noble and honorable, both to the man and 



vi INTRODUCTION 

the woman. After their marriage they lived for six years 
in retirement at Craigenputtoch, the property of Mrs. 
Carlyle's mother. Here Carlyle wrote his first great work, 
" Sartor Resartus," and several of his most notable essays. 
In 1834, the year in which Coleridge died and "Sartor 
Resartus" was completed in "Fraser's Magazine," he re- 
moved to London and settled at No. 5 Cheyne Row, Chel- 
sea, a house which he was to make famous by spending 
the rest of his days in. Here he wrote his three great 
histories and the other works which enabled him to live 
and brought him influence and fame. From 1837 to 1840 
he gave four annual series of lectures in London, which 
brought him money and reputation. The last and best of 
these courses he rewrote and published as "Heroes and 
Hero- Worship/' perhaps the most influential and popular 
of all his books. The most important dates in his literary 
life are 1837, the date of the "French Revolution," 1845, 
the date of "Cromwell," and 1858-1865, during which 
"Frederick the Great" appeared. His greatest triumph 
and his greatest loss came together. In 1866 the students 
of his old university elected him Lord Rector ; his rectorial 
address on the choice of books gave with great power the 
essence of his message to his age ; it was received not only 
in Edinburgh but throughout England with an enthusiasm 
which astonished him. Then, before he could return from 
Edinburgh, Mrs. Carlyle died suddenly while driving in 
her carriage in a London park. Carlyle never recovered 
from the blow. In the fifteen years of life remaining to 
him he did no more work, beyond laying up in his "Rem- 
iniscences" an imperishable record of his love, his grief, 
and his remorse. What he writes of his wife is one long- 
drawn wail of agony. The graybeard passion of seventy- 
one makes the outcries of any Romeo seem faint and 
pale. One more misfortune was to come upon him, his 
unhappy choice of a biographer and literary executor. 
Froude's life of Carlyle has one great merit : it tells the 
best as well as the worst of him; and it needs correction 
or modification on almost every page. For years after 



INTRODUCTION vii 

his death, Carlyle's name was covered with obloquy, but 
now the mists of detraction are thinning away, and soon 
it will be left shining clear as one of the very greatest of 
his age. 

Carlyle came from the same social stratum as Burns ; he 
was born a Scottish peasant, the son of a peasant. His 
birth at that time, in that country, in that social scale, 
conferred certain advantages. His father was a man of 
strong character; his mother was a deeply religious 
woman. Carlyle's affection for them in life, his loyalty 
to their memory in death, are among the best traits of his 
character. His gratitude towards them and his tenderness 
glow in the "Reminiscences" and "Letters." Father, 
mother, brothers, sisters toiled and saved that Tom, the 
clever boy of the family, might go to school and after- 
wards to college. Some day perhaps he would be a 
minister and wag his head in a pulpit. This respect for 
learning, this just appreciation of the intellectual is of the 
very warp and woof of Scottish character. The wise and 
pious father of Burns taught his children arithmetic, 
geography, and history in his poor clay hovel by candle- 
light, after his long day's labor in the fields. Living far 
more poorly than the poorest laboring man in America 
(butcher's meat was "unknown" in his house for years), 
he bought or borrowed standard books that his children 
might have some inkling of astronomy, natural history, 
and ancient history. He even drew up with his own hand 
a small treatise on the Christian religion, that they might 
have true light on this all-important matter. Many young 
men are ready for college who have not and could not 
read what Burns, the plough-boy, had mastered before 
his sixteenth year. Carlyle never had to work. Burns's 
schooling was of the scantiest and when little more than a 
child, he was set at all kinds of farm work, the "unceas- 
ing moil of a galley-slave," as he calls it himself. From 
childhood to his death, Burns had to fight a losing battle. 
Carlyle had also a sore battle, but he was a man of long- 
enduring hopes, and he had that "prudent, cautious self- 



viii INTRODUCTION 

control" that Burns so pathetically strove to attain to. 
He achieved his victory, while Burns died defeated. 

With similar parentage and upbringing, the two men 
had many traits of character in common. They are both 
truly Scottish in their love of their native country. The 
men of a Highland regiment on their return to Scotland 
after long absence on foreign service flung themselves on 
the ground and kissed the sacred earth. To Burns and 
Carlyle, there was no land like their own land. Burns's 
patriotic fervor glows in a hundred memorable lines. In 
"Sartor Resartus" Carlyle glorifies the humble village of 
his birth, and in his "Letters" passage after passage be- 
comes instinct with beauty and feeling as he touches on 
his native scenery. One wide-spread error regarding 
Scottish character demands correction. The Scots are sup- 
posed to be hard and cold, mere animated blocks of human 
granite. The often-quoted phrase of Buchanan's about 
their "perfervid" nature is nearer the truth. Their chief 
representative men, Scott, Burns, Carlyle, Stevenson, are 
men of the strongest and warmest feelings, capable of 
passionate love, passionate anger, passionate pity. 

As peasants born, Burns and Carlyle came early to see 
things as they are,— -how pain and labor and sorrow are 
appointed to the sons of men; and also how no lot, how- 
ever hard or mean, can prevent human character from 
growing to all rich fruitage of nobility and heroism. 
They had both the inestimable benefit of careful rearing 
by parents to whom religion was the one reality in life; 
to whom God, Heaven, Immortality were not matters for 
argument, but the very pillars of the universe. Their at- 
titude towards true religion was always reverential, though 
both heartily despised and lashed its counterfeit, cant, 
sham, hypocrisy. To the end of their lives, they were 
grateful for their early training; and their best work 
would have been something different, weaker, and less sig- 
nificant without the life, teaching, and example of their 
peasant forebears. In their political ideas they were both 
radicals, as Scottish peasants are apt to be, and no friends 



INTRODUCTION he 

of half measures. While the war of the American 
Revolution was at its height, Burns satirized the British 
campaigns; and while he was in government employ, he 
proposed the toast of Washington in place of Pitt, the 
British premier. Not only his poems, but his rash gift of 
the smuggler's carronades to the French revolutionists, 
show how instinctively he sympathized with all insurgents 
against the old impossible feudalism of Europe. Carlyle 
goes farther still. Living through the storm and turmoil 
of the reaction which followed Waterloo, of Catholic 
Emancipation, of the Reform Bill, of repeal of the Corn 
Laws, of Chartism, Carlyle sees no remedy for the ills of 
society but total destruction of the existing order and 
reorganization on a primitive model wherein the strong, 
able man should be king and the fickle crowd should yield 
him blind obedience. 

Both had great endowments of humor, deep and gen- 
uine, which at times became drastic, as the humor of 
peasants commonly is. Both were subject to melancholy: 
Carlyle is often hastily described as a pessimist and a 
Jeremiah. Their views of human life and of their own 
destiny were consistently sad. Both had a singular power 
of the tongue, a command of pungent words and satiric 
phrases that cut like a Cossack whip. Their conversation 
was much sought after; their sayings are remembered and 
pass from lip to lip. As regards expression, Burns is our 
first lyric poet, but much of his prose is worthy of respect, 
such as his autobiographic letter to Dr. Moore. Carlyle 
tried his hand at verse, with little more success than 
"Cousin Swift"; still he had, like Burns, the emotional 
temperament, poetic insight and sympathies. The chief 
excellences of his most characteristic writing are poetic 
excellences. 

Carlyle's style is frequently decried as obscure and 
eccentric, but with little justice. This criticism is now 
chiefly an echo of the abuse directed against his works 
when they first appeared, before he had created the audi- 
ence by which he was to be enjoyed. The ready acceptance 



x INTRODUCTION 

of established opinions always saves mental labor; but the 
earnest student will examine established opinions for 
himself. Carlyle's critics generally except his essays 
from this censure, and reserve the abusive term " Carry lese" 
to describe the style of "Sartar Resartus" and the 
"French Revolution." In reality his style is much the 
same in all his works. 

It is a strongly marked style. No tyro would confuse a 
page of the "Pilgrim's Progress" or the "Spectator" with 
a page of "Heroes and Hero- Worship." Classical prose 
is smooth, decorous, logical, manifesting the qualities of 
intelligence. Carlyle's prose is emphatic, uneven, declama- 
tory, manifesting the qualities of imagination and feeling. 
Such an ordinary rule as that requiring a verb in each 
sentence is disregarded by Carlyle. His prose is addressed 
to the ear rather than to the eye. Read aloud, it sounds 
like a man of strong feelings talking very earnestly, but 
not making a speech. It is not a style to imitate; and, as 
a matter of fact, it has no imitators. Again, it is a rich, 
concentrated style because Carlyle uses many figures and 
allusions. The second line of the essay alludes to Samuel 
Butler; it assumes that the reader knows his life and for- 
tunes; further, a quotation is immediately made from an 
epigram on his life and fortunes, an epigram which owes 
its point to a text of Scripture. Now if Carlyle took time 
to explain who Butler was, the nature of Samuel Wesley's 
verses, and the Sermon on the Mount, he could not pack 
it all into two lines and a half. By assuming that the 
reader knows the allusions, the writer saves space, secures 
the cooperation of the reader's mind, and makes his writ- 
ing rich and concentrated. Almost every page of Carlyle 
is studded with allusions of all kinds; hence those whose 
reading is limited do not always understand him clearly; 
hence the necessity for explanations, such as are given 
by the notes in the present volume. Again, Carlyle, with 
his imaginative temperament, is fond of the metaphor. 
Take the last sentence but one in the third paragraph — 
"This, however, is not painting a portrait, etc." By using 



INTRODUCTION xi 

this figure, Carlyle is able to state in a vivid way in small 
space what would have been colorless, and taken much 
space, had he stated it literally. Carlyle's metaphors are 
well thought out; for example, the comparison of Burns 
to a miner in paragraph 6, and the last sentence in para- 
graph 7. This disregard of ordinary grammatical struc- 
ture, this earnest tone, this fondness for figure and allu- 
sion, are the outstanding features of Carlyle's style. It is 
"alive to the finger-tips." Carlyle's essays were toned 
down by his various editors. Mr. H. W. Boynton makes 
an excellent suggestion that the modifying "we" sentences 
are Jeffrey's handiwork, the "editorial blotches" of which 
Carlyle complained to Emerson. 

Possessing an unconventional, vivid style, Carlyle is a 
coiner of quotable phrases. He is almost as much quoted 
as abused. His writings are as hard to classify as his 
style. He began as a translator from the German and as 
a writer of essays on German literature. They are on the 
familiar model of the "review" that Macaulay wrote. The 
book to be reviewed, the life or works of the author under 
consideration, is briefly praised or blamed and then thrown 
aside for an exposition of the writer's own views on the 
particular subject. They are really brief treatises rather 
than essays; but they suggest and stimulate rather than 
inform. Such essays as those on Scott, Burns, and John- 
son have had no slight influence on the literary reputations 
of these great names. "Sartor Resartus" is a spiritual 
autobiography, Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, the hero, is 
Thomas Carlyle slightly disguised. It is at the same time 
the vehicle for his very original opinions on many topics. 
His next work, the "History of the French Revolution," 
implies some knowledge of the main outlines of events 
comprehended under that name ; but the reader who begins 
with this slight equipment will have those events burnt 
in upon his memory by Carlyle's incomparable power of 
word-painting. "Heroes and Hero- Worship" is a sort of 
introduction to universal history; it is intended to supply 
point of view rather than fact. His editing of Cromwell's 



xii INTRODUCTION 

Letters" is a rehabilitation of a great man against long- 
established prejudice and obloquy. Lord Acton wrote: 
"He invented Oliver Cromwell." His greatest work was 
his last, his "History of Frederick the Great." Long as 
it is, unadinirable as the hero may be, this book shows 
Carlyle at his best in his marvellous power of making the 
dry bones of history live. Everything that came from his 
pen, "Past and Present," "Latter-Day Pamphlets," "Shoot- 
ing Niagara," however it may clash with received opinions, 
is vivid and interesting. Those writings that concern 
Carlyle the man most closely, the "Reminiscences," his 
"Letters," even his notes to his wife's "Memorials," have 
a picturesque interest, a force of phrase and feeling 
simply without parallel; for when all is said and done, 
Carlyle was a man of genius. 



II 

The phrase "a kindly Scot" expresses that readiness to 
recognize the claim of a common nationality, for which 
the Scottish people are famous, and which their enemies 
term "clannishness." Because James the First is a "kindly 
Scot," Scott deals gently with his faults and foibles in 
the "Fortunes of Nigel." For the same reason, Carlyle, 
a much sterner judge, is merciful to the failings of the 
"British Solomon" in the fragmentary history of Puri- 
tanism published since his death. Burns is also "a kindly 
Scot," of Carlyle's own social class and province, and 
Carlyle gives full play to this "clannish" feeling, which is 
a national characteristic. He is defending a fellow-coun- 
tryman against the world; and in defending him he is 
defending their common country. 

Throughout the essay Carlyle is on the defensive. Burns 
had been patronized by Jeffrey and by all his biographers; 
Carlyle resents this patronage. Burns's private life had 
been assailed by clerical critics; Carlyle will hardly admit 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

that it was faulty. The poet is unfortunate; his age, hie 
upbringing, society, everything is against him; he is a 
man more sinned against than sinning. The mantle of 
Carlyle's charity not only covers the multitude of Burns's 
sins, but if hides the plain facts o£ his life as well. It is 

as good as impossible to make out from Cariyle's account 

the main dates of Burns's life, such as those of his birth, 
marriage, visit to Edinburgh; Jean Armour's name is not 
even mentioned, nor the character and place of the vari- 
ous editions of his works. 

The essay then is not intended to inform the reader as 
an encyclopaedia would on the life and works of Burns. 
It is rather an evaluation of him as an artist, an "appre- 
ciation," to employ Pater's useful word. This task is not 
approached in the judicial mood of the ordinary critic, 
an Arnold, a Saintc-Beuve. Carlyle's mood is that of the 
advocate, not of the judge. Lockhart holds the scales with 
a much steadier hand. Carlyle gives the story of Burns's 
life in vague outline; the account in Lockhart is much 
fuller, though he too slurs over much that cannot be de- 
fended. The truth is that the bare recital of the plain 
fads without comment or criticism is sufficient condemna- 
tion. Burns did not attempt to defend himself; he knew 
his own faults and he i'elt bitter remorse for them. When 
his life is examined strictly by such a kindly-hearted 
"brither Scot" as Robert Louis Stevenson, so little dis- 
posed to be strait-laced or harsh in judgment, his con- 
demnation, though put mildly, is still unmistakable. No 
one would accuse Carlyle of wilfully suppressing the truth 
or suggesting what is false; but he chooses "certain aspects 
of Robert Burns," just as Stevenson does, to the exclusion 
of others, and discusses those only, as he had every right 
to do. 

Carlyle's central conception of the life of Burns is as a 
long duel to the death between the poet and society. The 
poet is born in the heart of the most un poetic age the 
world has ever known. lie is completely out of harmony 
with it; there must, of necessity, be enmity between the 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

two from the beginning to the end. Society crushes him 
down in toil and poverty from his earliest youth. Society 
denies him education and therefore full development of 
all his powers. The age is sceptical, and makes it impos- 
sible for the poet to have real faith, a true religion. 
Society catches him up when he proves his genius, amuses 
itself with him, wastes his time, his energy, his character, 
and then flings him aside like a broken toy. Society finds 
no fit employment for this man of genius but making a 
gauger of him. Carlyle's last analysis gives this result, 
a rare and splendid genius wasted in the ignoble drudgery 
of King George's Excise. Carlyle does not free Burns 
altogether from blame; but he lays the guilt of his ruin 
at the door of Society. 

Again, Burns presents himself to Carlyle under the 
aspect of a hero. Twelve years later he included him with 
Johnson and Rousseau in his lecture on "The Hero as Man 
of Letters." Just as a statue of a man much larger than 
human is called of heroic size, so a natural endowment of 
brain and heart surpassing the ordinary so far that the 
difference seems not of degree but kind, may be termed 
heroic. Carlyle has another touchstone of heroism, which 
he applies throughout his "Heroes and Hero- Worship" — 
sincerity. This is Burns's great claim to consideration. 
In his ingenious parallel between Byron and Burns, 
Carlyle shows how hard it is even for a great nature, 
hating the fault of affectation, to avoid falling into it. 

To demonstrate the greatness of Burns is the main pur- 
pose of the essay. To do this, Carlyle disengages his hero 
from the mean environment, the petty accidents, of his 
life, and fixes the reader's attention upon the real Burns. 
Ruskin says of true literature : "The author has something 
to say which he perceives to be true and useful, or help- 
fully beautiful. . . . He would fain set it down for- 
ever; engrave it on rock, if he could; saying, 'This is the 
best of me; for the rest, I ate and drank and slept, loved 
and hated, like another; my life was as the vapor and is 
not; but this I saw and knew; this, if anything of mine, 



INTRODUCTION xv 

is worth your memory. 1 ' " Carlyle unconsciously adopts 
this view. He gives us the best of Burns, the essential 
Burns, the pure gold without the alloy. The two names of 
world-wide fame when he wrote were Napoleon and Byron. 
He calls Burns "this intrinsically nobler, gentler and per- 
haps greater soul," compared to Napoleon, and he shows 
what the world is now fairly well agreed on, but what 
must have sounded most heretical in 1828, namely, the 
superiority of Burns, the Scottish ploughman, as a poet 
over Byron, the English peer. Jeffrey cut out a great deal 
of the essay, toned it down, thought it "exaggerated," and 
some of his modifying statements still remain; but in 
his high praise, Carlyle only anticipated the verdict of 
posterity. 

The world has not a long memory for the sins and fol- 
lies of literary men. It willingly lets scandal die and is 
content to remember the makers of books only by their 
moments of highest inspiration. 

What seemed "exaggerated" in the third decade of the 
last century is almost commonplace in the first decade of 
this. To have had the sympathetic insight to read Burns 
truly, and the boldness to proclaim his greatness convinc- 
ingly, are the outstanding merits of Carlyle in this essay. 

The greatness of Burns as a poet lay first in his sincer- 
ity. With his sensitive temperament and desire of fame, 
he would naturally be prone to the fault that these two 
things induce, namely, affectation. But he avoided the 
rock on which Byron made shipwreck. Next, he had a sin- 
gular power of making common things interesting. This 
means that he has insight, the discerning eye. Words- 
worth, in his famous first volume, "Lyrical Ballads," at- 
tempted to do this very thing, but he did not always suc- 
ceed. As a neighbor poet, with kindred aims, he admired 
Burns for this very quality, showing how verse can build 
a lofty throne on simple truth. With all his earnestness 
and truth, this peasant poet has deep tenderness for all the 

1 " Sesame and Lilies," Of Kings' Treasuries, § 9. 



xvi INTRODUCTION 

animal world, especially the weak, the timid, the injured. 
Like St. Francis of Assisi, he is brother to bird and beast ; 
his heart will overflow with tenderness even at the sight of 
a broken flower. This grace of thought is all his own, 
but he is no weak sentimentalist. He has astonishing in- 
tellectual grasp and vigor, which manifest themselves in 
memorable phrases of description. This power of intellect 
is no cold mechanical power of analysis; along with it goes 
great strength of feeling. He can be justly indignant; 
he can hate things deserving hatred with a perfect hatred. 
Besides, he has the great gift of humor, the grand preserv- 
ative of sanity, the antidote to sentimentality, the adjuster 
of proportion. These things make up the natural endow- 
ment of Burns. He made no adequate use of it. His 
poetry represents only a small part of what he was, to 
say nothing of what he might have been and what he might 
have done. Yet this small imperfect achievement puts him 
in the very first rank of the world's lyric poets. Such is 
Carlyle's reasoning on the genius of Burns, and no one 
will now contend that he does not make out his case. 

This is the main significance of Carlyle's essay which 
first saw the light seventy-eight years ago. Having the 
great advantage of coming from the same class in society, 
having, by right of birth, insight into his hero's life and 
character such as no previous critic possessed, and having 
further the necessary outlook upon the wide world of 
literature, Carlyle was able to see Burns in his true light 
and in his real proportions. He was not a mere peasant 
prodigy, not a gifted ploughman who must be apologized 
for at every turn, but one of the great poets of all time. 
These views Carlyle enforced with his peculiar fiery elo- 
quence. His style has faults, no doubt, but lack of earn- 
estness or lack of force are not among them. To Jeffrey, 
the eulogy seemed exaggerated; but it will not seem so 
now. It marks a new point of departure for the criticism 
of Burns, and the judgment of time has not yet reversed 
the decision of Carlyle. 



*CAKLYLE'S ESSAY " 

ON 

BURNS 

(" Edinburgh Review," 1828) 



BURNS 



IN the modern arrangements of society, it is no un- 
common thing that a man of genius must, like Butler, 
"ask for bread and receive a stone;" for, in spite of our 
grand maxim of supply and demand, it is by no means 
the highest excellence that men are most forward to recog- 5 

y nize^The^ inventor of a s pinning-jenny is P^^tj^JS^Bjif 
his reward in his own day; but the writer of a true poem, 
like the apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the 
contrary .*jf We do not know whether it is not an aggra- 
vation 01 the injustice, that there is generally a posthu- 10 
mous retribution. Robert Burns, in the course of nature, 
might yet have been living; but his short life was spent 
in toil and penury; and he died, in the prime of his man- 
hood, miserable and neglected; and yet already a brave 
mausoleum shines over his dust, and more than one splen- 15 
did monument has been reared in other places to his fame ; 
the street where he languished in poverty is called by his 
name; the highest personages in our literature have been 
proud to appear as his commentators and admirers; and 
here is the sixth narrative of his Life that has been given 20 
to the world ! 

^s Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologize for this 
new attempt on such a subject: but his readers, we be- 
lieve, will readily acquit him; or, at worst, will censure 
only the performance of his task, not the choice of it. 25 
The character of Burns, indeed, is a theme that cannot 
easily become either trite or exhausted ; and will probably 
gain rather than lose in its dimensions by the distance to 



4 CARLYLE 

which it is removed by Time. QsTo man, it has been said, 
is a hero to his valet] ~/and this is probably true; but the 
fault is at least as finely to be the valet's as the hero's. 
For it is certain, that to the vulgar eye few things are 

5 wonderful that are not distant. It is difficult for men to 
believe that the man, the mere man whom they see, nay 
perhaps painfully feel, toiling at their side through the 
poor jostlings of existence, can be made of finer clay than 
themselves. Suppose that some dining acquaintance of 

10 Sir Thomas Lucy's, and neighbor of John a Combe's, had 
snatched an hour or two from the preservation of his 
game, and written us a Life of Shakespeare! What dis- 
sertations should we not have had, —not on "Hamlet" and 
"The Tempest," but on the wool-trade, and deer-stealing, 

15 and the libel and vagrant laws; and how the Poacher be- 
came a Player; and how Sir Thomas and Mr. John had 
Christian bowels, and did not push him to extremities ! In 
like manner, we believe, with respect to Burns, that till the 
companions of his pilgrimage, the Honorable Excise Com- 

20 missioners, and the Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, 
and the Dumfries Aristocracy, and all the Squires and 
Earls, equally with the Ayr Writers, and the New and Old 
Light Clergy, whom he had to do with, shall have be- 
come invisible in the darkness of the Past, or visible only 

25 by light borrowed from his juxtaposition, it will be diffi- 
cult to measure him by any true standard, or to estimate 
what he really was and did, in the eighteenth century, for 
his country and the world. It will be difficult, we say ; but 
still a fair problem for literary historians; and repeated 

30 attempts will give us repeated approximations. 

^ His former biographers have done something, no doubt, 

/ /Dut by no means a great deal, to assist us. Dr. Currie 

and Mr. Walker, the principal of these writers, have both, 

we think, mistaken one essentially important thing: their 

35 own and the world's true relation to their author, and the 
style in which it became such men to think and to speak 
of such a man. Dr. Currie loved the poet truly; more 
perhaps than he avowed to his readers, or even to him- 



BURNS 5 

self; yet he everywhere introduces him with a certain 
patronizing, apologetic air; as if the polite public might 
think it strange and half unwarrantable that he, a man 
of science, a scholar and gentleman, should do such honor 
to a rustic. In all this, however, we readily admit that 5 
his fault was not want of love, but weakness of faith; 
and regret that the first and kindest of all our poet's 
biographers should not have seen farther, or believed 
more boldly what he saw. Mr. Walker offends more 
deeply in the same kind: and both err alike in present- 10 
ing us with a detached catalogue of his several supposed 
attributes, virtues and vices, instead of a delineation of 
the resulting character as a living unity. This, however, 
is not painting a portrait; but gauging the length and 
breadth of the several features, and jotting down their 15 
dimensions in arithmetical ciphers. Nay it is not so much 
as that: for we are yet to learn by what acts or instru- 
ments the mind could be so measured and gauged. 
/L.M.V. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided both 
Jihese errors. He uniformly treats Burns as the high and. 20 
remarkable man the public voice has now pronounced him 
to be: and in delineating him, he has avoided the method 
of separate generalities, and rather sought for character- 
istic incidents, habits, actions, sayings; in a word, for as- 
pects which exhibit the whole man, as he looked and lived 25 
among his fellows. The book accordingly, with all its 
deficiencies, gives more insight, we think, into the true 
character of Burns, than any prior biography: though, 
being written on the very popular and condensed scheme 
of an article for "Constable's Miscellany," it has less 30 
depth than we could have wished and expected from a 
writer of such power; and contains rather more, and 
more multifarious quotations than belong of right to an 
original production. Indeed, Mr. Lockhart's own writing 
is generally so good, so clear, direct and nervous, that we 35 
seldom wish to see it making place for another man's. 
However, the spirit of the work is throughout candid, 
tolerant and anxiously conciliating; compliments and 



6 CARLYLE 

praises are liberally distributed, on all hands, to great and 
small ; and, as Mr. Morris Birkbeek observes of the society 
in the backwoods of America, "the courtesies of polite 
life are never lost sight of for a moment." But there are 
5 better things than these in the volume; and we can safely 
testify, not only that it is easily and pleasantly read a 
fir st time, but may even be without difficulty read again. 
^^/Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the prob- 

^^lem of Burns's Biography has yet been adequately solved. 

10 We do not allude so much to deficiency of facts or docu- 
ments,— though of these we are still every day receiving 
some fresh accession,— as to the limited and imperfect ap- 
plication of them to the great end of Biography. Our 
notions upon this subject may perhaps appear extrava- 

15 gant; but if an individual is really of consequence enough 
to have his life and character recorded for public remem- 
brance, we have always been of opinion that the public 
ought to be made acquainted with all the inward springs 
and relations of his character. How did the world and 

20 man's life, from his particular position, represent them- 
selves to his mind? How did coexisting circumstances 
modify him from without; how did he modify these from 
within? With what endeavors and what efficacy rule over 
them; with what resistance and what suffering sink under 

25 them? In one word,{what and how produced was the ef- 
fect of society on hint ; \ gFaf and how produced wa s his 
effect on society? , He who should answer these questions, 
in regard to any individual, would, as we believe, furnish 
a model of perfection in Biography. Few individuals, 

30 indeed, can deserve such a study; and many lives will be 
written, and, for the gratification of innocent curiosity, 
ought to be written, and read and forgotten, which are not 
in this sense biographies. But Burns, if we mistake not, 
is one of these few individuals; and such a study, at 

35 least with such a result, he has not yet obtained. Our 
own contributions to it, we are aware, can be but scanty 
and feeble; but we offer them with good- will, and trust 
they may meet with acceptance from those they are in 
tended for. 
















BURNS 

urns first^ came upon the world as a pro(Hg yL£fti4 was 

m that ll^Sacter, entertained by it, in the usual fashi,p ri; 

with loud/ vague, tumulTOOus^wonaer, speedily subsiding 



into censure, and neglect ;/^lLhisearly and most ff mournf ul 
death again "awakened an ; ^ritMsia|m for him, which, espe- 
cially as tiiere was now n ofEn g Jo, be done, and much to. 



10 



^ 



isTrueythe "nine day^^ave long since elapsed; and the 
very continuance of this clamor proves that Burns was no 
vulgar wondeA Accordingly, even in sober judgments, 
where, as years passed by, he has come to rest more and 
more exclusively on his own intrinsic merits, and may now 
be well-nigh shorn of that casual radiance, he appears not 
only as a true British poet, but as one of the most con- 
siderable British men of the eighteenth century. Let it 15 
not be objected that he did little. He did much, if we 
consider where and how. If the work performed was 
small, we must remember that he had his very materials to 
discover; for the metal he worked in lay hid under the 
desert moor, where no eye but his had guessed its exist- 20 
ence; and we may almost say, that with his own hand he 
had to construct the tools for fashioning it. For he found 
himself in deepest obscurity, without help, without in- 
struction, without model; or with models only of the 
meanest sort. An educated man stands, as it were, in 25 
the midst of a boundless arsenal and magazine, filled 
with all the weapons and engines which man's skill has 
been able to devise from the earliest time; and he works, 
accordingly, with a strength borrowed from all past ages. 
How different is his state who stands on the outside of 30 
that storehouse, and feels that its gates must be stormed, 
or remain forever shut against him! His means are the 
commonest and rudest; the mere work done is no measure 
of his strength. A dwarf behind his steam-engine may 
remove mountains ; but no dwarf will hew them down with a 35 
pickaxe; and he must be a Titan that hurls them abroad 
with his arms. 

It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself. 



8 CARLYLE 

Born in an age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, and S 
in a condition the most disadvantageous, where his mind, 
if it accomplished aught, must accomplish it under the 
pressure of continual bodily toil, nay, of penury and de- 

5 sponding apprehension of the worst evils, and with no 
furtherance but such knowledge as dwells in a poor man's 
hut, and the rhymes of a Ferguson or Ramsay for his 
standard of beauty, he sinks not under all these impedi- 
ments : through the fogs and darkness of that obscure re- 

10 gion, his lynx eye discerns the true relations of the world 
and human life; he grows into intellectual strength, and 
trains himself into intellectual expertness. Impelled by 
the expansive movement of his own irrepressible soul, he 
struggles forward into the general view ; and with haughty 

15 modesty lays down before us, as the fruit of his labor, a 
gift, which Time has now pronounced imperishable. Add 
to all this, that his darksome drudging childhood and 
youth was by far the kindliest era of his whole life; and 
that he died in his thirty-seventh year : and then ask, if it 

20 be strange that his poems are imperfect, and of small ex- 
tent, or that his genius attained no mastery in its art? 
Alas, his Sun shone as through a tropical tornado ; and the 
pale Shadow of Death eclipsed it at noon ! Shrouded in 
such baleful vapors, the genius of Burns was never seen 

25 in clear azure splendor, enlightening the world: but somf* 

beams from it did, by fits, pierce through; and it tinted 

those clouds with rainbow and orient colors, into a glory 

and stern grandeur, which men silently gazed on with 

/wonder and tears! 

30 K. We are anxious not to exaggerate; for it is exposition 
rather than admiration that our readers require of us here ; 
and yet to avoid some tendency to that side is no easy mat- 
ter. We love Burns, and we pity him ; and love and pity 
are prone to magnify. Criticism, it is sometimes thought, 

35 should be a cold business; we are not so sure of this; but, 
at all events, our concern with Burns is not exclusively 
that of critics. True and genial as his poetry must ap- 
pear, it is not chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that he in- 



BURNS 9 

terests and affects us. He was often advised to write a 
tragedy: time and means were not lent him for this; but 
through life he enacted a tragedy, and one of the deepest. 
We question whether the world has since witnessed so ut- 
terly sad a scene; whether Napoleon himself, left to brawl 5 
with Sir Hudson Lowe, and perish on his rock, "amid the 
melancholy main," presented to the reflecting mind such 
a "spectacle of pity and fear" as did this intrinsically 
nobler, gentler and perhaps greater soul, wasting itself 
away in a hopeless struggle with base entanglements, 10 
which coiled closer and closer round him, till only death 
opened him an outlet. Conquerors are a class of men 
with whom, for most part, the world could well dispense; 
nor can the hard intellect, the unsympathizing loftiness 
and high but selfish enthusiasm of such persons inspire 15 
us in general with any affection; at best it may excite 
amazement; and their fall, like that of a pyramid, will be 
beheld with a certain sadness and awe. But a true Poet, 
a man in whose heart resides some effluence of Wisdom, 
some tone of the "Eternal Melodies," is the most precious 20 
gift that can be bestowed on a generation : we see in him 
a freer, purer development of whatever is noblest in our- 
selves; his life is a rich lesson to us; and we mourn his 
death as that of a benefactor who loved and taught us. 
f Such a gift had Nature, in her bounty, bestowed on 25 
us in Robert Burns; but with queen-like indifference she 
cast it from her hand, like a thing of no moment; and 
it was defaced and torn asunder, as an idle bauble, before 
we recognized it. To the ill-starred Burns was given the 
power of making man's life more venerable, but that of 30 
wisely guiding his own life was not given. Destiny,— for 
so in our ignorance we must speak,— his faults, the faults 
of others, proved too hard for him ; and that spirit, which 
might have soared could it but have walked, soon sank to 
the dust, its glorious faculties trodden under foot in the 35 
blossom; and died, we may almost say, without ever hav- 
ing lived. And so kind and warm a soul; so full of in- 
born riches, of love to all living and lifeless things ! How 



10 CARLYLE 

his heart flows out in sympathy over universal Nature; 
and in her bleakest provinces discerns a beauty and a 
meaning! The "Daisy" falls not unheeded under his 
ploughshare; nor the ruined nest of that "wee, cowering, 
5 timorous beastie," cast forth, after all its provident pains, 
to "thole the sleety dribble, and cranreuch cauld." The 
"hoar visage" of Winter delights him; he dwells with a 
sad and oft-returning fondness in these scenes of solemn 
desolation; but the voice of the tempest becomes an an- 

10 them to his ears; he loves to walk in the sounding woods, 
for "it raises his thoughts to Him that walketh on the 
wings of the wind" A true Poet-soul, for it needs but to 
be struck, and the sound it yields will be music ! But ob- 
serve him chiefly as he mingles with his brother men. 

15 What warm, all-comprehending fellow-feeling; what 
trustful, boundless love; what generous exaggeration of 
the object loved! His rustic friend, his nut-brown 
maiden, are no longer mean and homely, but a hero and a 
queen, whom he prizes as the paragons of Earth. The 

20 rough scenes of Scottish life, not seen by him in any 
Arcadian illusion, but in the rude contradiction, in the 
smoke and soil of a too harsh reality, are still lovely to 
him : Poverty is indeed his companion, but Love also, and 
Courage; the simple feelings, the worth, the nobleness, 

25 that dwell under the straw roof, are dear and venerable to ^ 
his heart: and thus over the lowest provinces of man's 
existence he pours the glory of his own soul; and they 
rise, in shadow and sunshine, softened and brightened 
into a beauty which other eyes discern not in the highest. 

30 He has a just self -consciousness, which too often degen- 
erates into pride; yet it is a noble pride, for defence, not 
for offence; no cold suspicious feeling, but a frank and 
social one. The Peasant Poet bears himself, we might 
say, like a King in exile: he is cast among the low, and 

35 feels himself equal to the highest; yet he claims no rank, 
that none may be disputed to him. The forward he can 
repel, the supercilious he can subdue; pretensions of 
wealth or ancestry are of no avail with him; there is a 



BURNS 11 

fire in that dark eye, under which the "insolence of con- 
descension" cannot thrive. In his abasement, in his ex- 
treme need, he forgets not for a moment the majesty of 
Poetry and Manhood. And yet, far as he feels himself 
above common men, he wanders not apart from them, but 5 
mixes warmly in their interests; nay throws himself into 
their arms, and, as it were, entreats them to love him. It 
is moving to see how, in his darkest despondency, this 
proud being still seeks relief from friendship; unbosoms 
himself, often to the unworthy; and, amid tears, strains 10 
to his glowing heart a heart that knows only the name of 
friendship. And yet he was "quick to learn"; a man of 
keen vision, before whom common disguises afforded no 
concealment. His understanding saw through the hol- 
lowness even of accomplished deceivers; but there was a 15 
generous credulity in his heart. And so did our Peasant 
show himself among us; "a soul like an JEolian harp, 
in whose strings the vulgar wind, as it passed through 
them, changed itself into articulate melody." And this 
was he for whom the world found no fitter business than 20 
quarrelling with smugglers and vintners, computing ex- 
cise-dues upon tallow, and gauging ale-barrels! In such 
toils was that mighty Spirit sorrowfully wasted: and a 
hundred years may pass on, before another such is given 
us to waste. 25 

p All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has left, 
seem to us, as we hinted above, no more than a poor 
mutilated fraction of what was in him; brief, broken 
glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete ; 
that wanted all things for completeness: culture, leisure, 30 
true effort, nay even length of life. His poems are, with 
scarcely any exception, mere occasional effusions; poured 
forth with little premeditation; expressing, by such means 
as offered, the passion, opinion, or humor of the hour. 
Never in one instance was it permitted him to grapple 35 
with any subject with the full collection of his strength, 
to fuse and mould it in the concentrated fire of his genius. 



12 CARLYLE 

To try by the strict rules of Art such imperfect frag- 
ments, would be at once unprofitable and unfair. Never- 
theless, there is something in these poems, marred and de- 
fective as they are, which forbids the most fastidious stu- 
5 dent of poetry to pass them by. Some sort of enduring 
quality they must have : for after fifty years of the wild- 
est vicissitudes in poetic taste, they still continue to be 
read; nay, are read more and more eagerly, more and 
more extensively; and this not only by literary virtuosos, 

10 and that class upon whom transitory causes operate most 
strongly, but by all classes, down to the most hard, unlet- 
tered and truly natural class, who read little, and espe- 
cially no poetry, except because they find pleasure in it. 
The grounds of so singular and wide a popularity, which 

15 extends, in a literal sense, from the palace to the hut, and 
over all regions where the English tongue is spoken, 
are well worth inquiring into. After every just deduc- 
tion, it seems to imply some rare excellence in these 
works. What is that excellence? 

20 ^ To answer this question will not lead us far. The ex- 
cellence of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether 
in poetry or prose; but, at the same time, it is plain and 
easily recognized: his Si nceri ty, his indisputable air of 
Truth. Here are no fabulous woes or joys; no hollow 

25 fantastic sentimentalities; no wiredrawn refinings, either 
in thought or feeling : the passion that is traced before us 
has glowed in a living heart; the opinion he utters has 
risen in his own understanding, and been a light to his 
own steps. He does not write from hearsay, but from 

30 sight and experience; it is the scenes that he has lived 
and labored amidst, that he describes: those scenes, rude 
and humble as they are, have kindled beautiful emotions 
in his soul, noble thoughts, and definite resolves; and he 
speaks forth what is in him, not from any outward call 

35 of vanity or interest, but because his heart is too full to 
be silent. He speaks it with such melody and modula- 
tion as he can; "in homely rustic jingle"; but it is his 
own, and genuine. This is the grand secret for finding 



BURNS 13 

readers and retaining them: let him who would move and 
convince others, be first moved and convinced himself. 
Horace's rule, Si vis me flere, is applicable in a wider 
sense than the literal one. To every poet, to every writer, 
we might say: Be true, if you would be believed. Let a 5 
man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the thought, 
the emotion, the actual condition of his own heart; and 
other men, so strangely are we all knit together by the tie of 
sympathy, must and will give heed to him. In culture, in 
extent of view, we may stand above the speaker, or below 10 
him; but in either case, his words, if they are earnest and 
sincere, will find some response within us; for in spite of 
all casual varieties in outward rank or inward, as face 
answers to face, so does the heart of man to man. 
&* This may appear a very simple principle, and one which 15 
Burns had little merit in discovering. True, the discovery 
is easy enough : but the practical appliance is not easy ; is 
indeed the fundamental difficulty which all poets have to 
strive with, and which scarcely one in the hundred ever 
fairly surmounts. A head too dull to discriminate the 20 
true from the false ; a heart too dull to love the one at all 
risks, and to hate the other in spite of all temptations, are 
alike fatal to a writer. With either, or as more commonly 
happens, with both of these deficiencies combine a love of 
distinction, a wish to be original, which is seldom want- 25 
ing, and we have Affectation, the bane of literature, as 
Cant, its elder brother, is of morals. How often does the 
one and the other front us, in poetry, as in life! Great 
poets themselves are not always free of this vice; nay, it 
is precisely on a certain sort and degree of greatness that 30 
it is most commonly ingrafted. A strong effort after ex- 
cellence will sometimes solace itself with a mere shadow 
of success; he who has much to unfold, will sometimes 
unfold it imperfectly. Byron, for instance, was no com- 
mon man: yet if we examine his poetry with this view, 35 
we shall find it far enough from faultless. Generally 
speaking, we should say that it is not true. He refreshes 
us, not with the divine fountain, but too often with vulgar 



14 CARLYLE 

strong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but soon 
ending in dislike, or even nausea. Are his Harolds and 
Giaours, we would ask, real men; we mean, poetically 
consistent and conceivable men ? Do not these characters, 
5 does not the character of their author, which more or less 
shines through them all, rather appear a thing put on for 
the occasion; no natural or possible mode of being, but 
something intended to look much grander than nature? 
Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic heroism, 

10 superhuman contempt and moody desperation, with so 
much scowling, and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous 
humor, is more like the brawling of a player in some 
paltry tragedy, which is to last three hours, than the 
bearing of a man in the business of life, which is to last 

15 threescore and ten years. To our minds there is a taint 
of this sort, something which we should call theatrical, 
false, affected, in every one of these otherwise so power- 
ful pieces. Perhaps "Don Juan," especially the latter 
parts of it, is the only thing approaching to a sincere 

20 work, he ever wrote; the only work where he showed him- 
self, in any measure, as he was; and seemed so intent 'on 
his subject as, for moments, to forget himself. Yet 
Byron hated this vice ; w,e believe, heartily detested it : 
nay he had declared formal war against it in words. So 

25 difficult is it even for the strongest to make this primary 
attainment, which might seem the simplest of all: to read 
its own conscioitsness without mistakes, without errors in- 
voluntary or wilful! We recollect no poet of Burns's 
susceptibility who comes before us from the first, and 

30 abides with us to the last, with such a total want of affec- 
tation. He is an honest man, and an honest writer. In 
his successes and his failures, in his greatness and his 
littleness, he is ever clear, simple, true, and glitters with 
no lustre but his own. We reckon this to be a great vir- 

35 tue; to be, in fact, the root of most other virtues, literary 
as well as moral. 

l^Here, however, let us say, it is to the Poetry of Burns 
"fiat we now allude; to those writings which he had time 



BURNS 15 

to meditate, and where no special reason existed to warp 
his critical feeling, or obstruct his endeavor to fulfil it. 
Certain of his Letters, and other fractions of prose com- 
position, by no means deserve this praise. Here, doubt- 
less, there is not the same natural truth of style; but on 5 
the contrary, something not only stiff, but strained and 
twisted; a certain high-flown inflated tone; the stilting 
emphasis of which contrasts ill with the firmness and 
rugged simplicity of even his poorest verses. Thus no 
man, it would appear, is altogether unaffected. Does not 10 
Shakespeare himself sometimes premeditate the sheerest 
bombast ! But even with regard to these Letters of Burns, 
it is but fair to state that he had two excuses. The first 
was his comparative deficiency in language. Burns, 
though for most part he writes with singular force and 15 
even gracefulness, is not master of English prose, as he is 
of Scottish verse; not master of it, we mean, in propor- 
tion to the depth and vehemence of his matter. These 
Letters strike us as the effort of a man to express some- 
thing which he has no organ fit for expressing. But a 20 
second and weightier excuse is to be found in the pecu- 
liarity of Burns's social rank. His correspondents are 
often men whose relation to him he has never accurately 
ascertained; whom therefore he is either forearming him- 
self against, or else unconsciously flattering, by adopting 25 
the style he thinks will please them. At all events we 
should remember that these faults, even in his Letters, 
are not the rule, but the exception. Whenever he writes, 
as one would ever wish to do, to trusted friends and on 
real interests, his style becomes simple, vigorous, expres- 30 
sive, sometimes even beautiful. His letters to Mrs. Dunlop 
are uniformly excellent. 

(4, But we return to his Poetry. In addition to its Sin- 
cerity, it has another peculiar merit, which indeed is but a 
mode, or perhaps a means, of the foregoing : this displays 35 
itself in his choice of subjects : or rather in his indiffer- 
ence as to subjects, and the power he has of making all 
subjects interesting. The ordinary poet, like the ordinary 



16 CARLYLE 

man, is forever seeking in external circumstances the help 
which can be found only in himself. In what is familiar 
and near at hand, he discerns no form or comeliness: 
home is not poetical but prosaic; it is in some past, dis- 

5 tant, conventional heroic world, that poetry resides; were 
he there and not here, were he thus and not so, it would 
be well with him. Hence our innumerable host of rose- 
colored Novels and iron-mailed Epics, with their locality 
not on the Earth, but somewhere nearer to the Moon. 

10 Hence our Virgins of the Sun, and our Knights of the 
Cross, malicious Saracens in turbans, and copper-colored 
Chiefs in wampum, and so many other truculent figures 
from the heroic times or the heroic climates, who on all 
hands swarm in our poetry. Peace be with them! But 
yet, as a great moralist proposed preaching to the men 
of this century, so would we fain preach to the poets, "a 
sermon on the duty of staying at home." Let them be 
sure that heroic ages and heroic climates can do little for 
them. That form of life has attraction for us, less be- 

20 cause it is better or nobler than our own, than simply be- 
cause it is different; and even this attraction must be of 
the most transient sort. For will not our own age, one 
day, be an ancient one; and have as quaint a costume as 
the rest; not contrasted with the rest, therefore, but 

25 ranked along with them, in respect of quaintness? Does 
Homer interest us now, because he wrote of what passed 
beyond his native Greece, and two centuries before he 
was born; or because he wrote what passed in God's 
world, and in the heart of man, which is the same after 

30 thirty centuries? Let our poets look to this: is their feel- 
ing really finer, truer, and their vision deeper than that 
of other men,— they have nothing to fear, even from the 
humblest subject; is it not so,— they have nothing to 
hope, but an ephemeral favor, even from the highest. 

35^ The poet, we imagine, can never have far to seek for a 
subject: the elements of his art are in him, and around 
him on every hand; for him the Ideal world is not re- 
mote from the Actual, but under it and within it : nay, he 



lit 



BURNS 17 

is a poet, precisely because he can discern it there. Wher- 
ever there is a sky above him, and a world around him, 
the poet is in his place; for here too is man's existence, 
with his infinite longings and small acquirings; its ever- 
thwarted, ever-renewed endeavors; its unspeakable aspira- 5 
tions, its fears and hopes that wander through Eternity; 
and all the mystery of brightness and of gloom that it was 
ever made of, in any age or climate, since man first began 
to live. Is there not the fifth act of a Tragedy in every 
death-bed, though it were a peasant's and a bed of heath? 10 
And are wooings and weddings obsolete, that there can be 
Comedy no longer? Or are men suddenly grown wise, 
that Laughter must no longer shake his sides, but be 
cheated of his Farce? Man's life and nature is as it 
was, and as it will ever be. But the poet must have an 15 
eye to read these things, and a heart to understand them; 
or they come and pass away before him in vain. He is 
a vates, a seer; a gift of vision has been given him. Has 
life no meanings for him, which another cannot equally 
decipher; then he is no poet, and Delphi itself will not 20 
make him one. 

In this respect, Burns, though not perhaps absolutely 
a great poet, better manifests his capability, better proves 
the truth of his genius, than if he had by his own strength 
kept the whole Minerva Press going, to the end of his 25 
literary course. He shows himself at least a poet of 
Nature's own making; and Nature, after all, is still the 
grand agent in making poets. We often hear of this and 
the other external condition being requisite for the exist- 
ence of a poet. Sometimes it is a certain sort of training; 30 
he must have studied certain things, studied for instance 
"the elder dramatists," and so learned a poetic language; 
as if poetry lay in the tongue, not in the heart. At other 
times we are told he must be bred in a certain rank, and 
must be on a confidential footing with the higher classes; 35 
because, above all things, he must see the world. As to 
seeing the world, we apprehend this will cause him little 
difficulty, if he have but eyesight to see it with. Without 



\1 



18 CARLYLE 

eyesight, indeed, the task might be hard. The blind or 
the purblind man "travels from Dan to Beersheba, and 
finds it all barren." But happily every poet is born in 
the world; and sees it, with or against his will, every day 

5 and every hour he lives. The mysterious workmanship of 
man's heart, the true light and the inscrutable darkness of 
man's destiny, reveal themselves not only in capital cities 
and crowded saloons, but in every hut and hamlet where 
men have their abode. Nay, do not the elements of all 

10 human virtues and all human vices; the passions at once 
of a Borgia and of a Luther, lie written, in stronger or 
fainter lines, in the consciousness of every individual 
bosom, that has practised honest self -examination ? Truly 
this same world may be seen in Mossgiel and Tarbolton, 

15 if we look well, as clearly as it ever came to light in 
Crockf ord's, or the Tuileries itself. 

But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on the 
poor aspirant to poetry; for it is hinted that he should 
have been born two centuries ago; inasmuch as poetry, 

20 about that date, vanished from the earth, and became no 
longer attainable by men! Such cobweb speculations 
have, now and then, overhung the field of literature; but 
they obstruct not the growth of any plant there: the 
Shakespeare or the Burns, unconsciously and merely as 

25 he walks onward, silently brushes them away. Is not 
every genius an impossibility till he appear? Why do we 
call him new and original, if we saw where his marble was 
lying, and what fabric he could rear from it? It is not 
the material but the workman that is wanting. It is not 

30 the dark place that hinders, but the dim eye. A Scottish 
peasant's life was the meanest and rudest of all lives, till 
Burns became a poet in it, and a poet of it; found it a 
man's life, and therefore significant to men. A thousand 
battle-fields remain unsung; but the Wounded Hare has 

35 not perished without its memorial; a balm of mercy yet 
breathes on us from its dumb agonies, because a poet was 
there. Our Halloween had passed and repassed, in rude 
awe and laughter, since the era of the Druids; but no 



10 



BURNS 19 

Theocritus, till Burns, discerned in it the materials of a 
Scottish Idyl: neither was the Holy Fair any Council of 
Trent or Roman Jubilee; but nevertheless, Superstition 
and Hypocrisy and Fun having been propitious to him, 
in this man's hand it became a poem, instinct with satire 
and genuine comic life. Let but the true poet be given 
us, we repeat it, place him where and how you will, and 
^/true poetry will not be wanting. 
J^L. Independently of the essential gift of poetic feeling, as 
f\. ^ve have now attempted to describe it, a certain rugged 
sterl ing worth pervades whatever Burns has writlenf a 
virtue, as of green fields and mountain breezes, dwells in 
his poetry ; it is redolent of natural life and hardy natural 
men. There is a decisive strength in him, and yet a sweet 
native gracefulness : he is tender, he is vehement, yet with- is 
out constraint or too visible effort; he melts the heart, 
or inflames it, with a power which seems habitual and 
familiar to him. We see that in this man there was the 
gentleness, the trembling pity of a woman, with the deep 
earnestness, the force and passionate ardor of a hero. 20 
Tears lie in him, and consuming fire ; as lightning lurks in 
the drops of the summer cloud. He has a resonance in his 
bosom for every note of human feeling; the high and the 
low, the sad, the ludicrous, the joyful, are welcome in 
their turns to his "lightly-moved and all-conceiving spirit." 25 
And observe with what a fierce prompt force he grasps 
his subject, be it what it may ! How he fixes, as it were, 
the full image of the matter in his eye; full and clear in 
every lineament; and catches the real type and essence of 
it, amid a thousand accidents and superficial circumstances, 30 
no one of which misleads him! Is it of reason; some 
truth to be discovered? No sophistry, no vain surface- 
logic detains him; quick, resolute, unerring, he pierces 
through into the marrow of the question; and speaks his 
verdict with an emphasis that cannot be forgotten. Is it 35 
of description; some visual object to be represented? No 
poet of any age or nation is more graphic than Burns: 
the characteristic features disclose themselves to him at a 



20 CARLYLE 

glance ; three lines from his hand, and we have a likeness. 
And, in that rough dialect, in that rude, often awkward 
metre, so clear and definite a likeness! It seems a 
draughtsman working with a burnt stick; and yet the 
5 burin of a Retzsch is not more expressive or exact. 
\C\Of this last excellence, the plainest and most compre- 
hensive of all, being indeed the root and foundation of 
every sort of talent, poetical or intellectual, we could pro- 
duce innumerable instances from the writings of Burns. 
10 Take these glimpses of a snow-storm from his "Winter 
Night" (the italics are ours) : 

"When biting Boreas, fell and doure, 
Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r, 
And Phcebus gies a short-liv'd glowr 
15 Far south the lift, 

Dim-dark 9 ning thro' the flaky show'r 
Or whirling drift: 

Ae night the storm the steeples rock'd, 
Poor Labor sweet in sleep was lockM, 
20 While burns wi' snawy wreeths upcholc'd 

Wild-eddying swirl, 
Or thro' the mining outlet bock'd, 

Down headlong hurl. ' ' 

hPAre there not " rjp.sfiript.ive touche s" here ? The describer 
25 saw this thing; the essential feature and true likeness of 

every circumstance in it; saw, and not with the eye only. 

"Poor labor lock'd in sweet sleep"; the dead stillness 

of man, unconscious, vanquished, yet not unprotected, 

while such strife of the material elements rages, and 
30 seems to reign supreme in loneliness: this is of the heart 

as well as of the eye!— Look also at his image of a thaw, 

and prophesied fall of the "Auld Brig": 

"When heavy, dark, continued, a '-day rains 
Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains; 
35 When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil, 

Or stately Lugar 's mossy fountains boil, 



BURNS 21 

Or whdrd the Greenock winds his moorland course, 

Or haunted Garpal * draws his feeble source, 

Arous'd by blustering winds and spotting thowes, 

In mony a torrent down his snaw-broo rowes; 

While crashing ice, borne on the roaring speat, 5 

Sweeps dams and mills and brigs a 9 to the gate; 

And from Glenbuck down to the Bottonkey, 

Auld Ayr is just one lengthen 'd tumbling sea; 

Then down ye '11 hurl, Deil nor ye never rise ! 

And dash the gumlie jaups up to the pouring skies. ' ' 10 

^ The last line is in itself a Poussin-picture of that 
Deluge! The welkin has, as it were, bent down with its 
weight; the "gumlie jaups" and the "pouring skies" are 
mingled together; it is a world of rain and ruin.— -In re- 
spect of mere clearness and minute fidelity, the "Farm- 15 
er's" commendation of his "Auld Mare," in plough or in 
cart, may vie with Homer's Smithy of the Cyclops, or 
yoking of Priam's Chariot. Nor have we forgotten stout 
"Burn-the-wind" and his brawny customers, inspired by 
"Scotch Drink": but it is needless to multiply examples. 20 
One other trait of a much finer sort we select from multi- 
tudes of such among his "Songs." It gives, in a single 
line, to the saddest feeling the saddest environment and 
local habitation : 

4 'The pale Moon is setting beyond the white wave, 25 

And Time is setting wi y me, 0; 
Farewell, false friends! false lover, farewell! 
I '11 nae mair trouble them nor thee, O." 

T^This clearness of sigh t we have called the foundation of 
all talent; for in fact, unless we see our object, how shall 30 
we know how to place or prize it, in our understanding, our 
imagination, our affections? Yet it is not in itself, per- 
haps, a very high excellence; but capable of being united 
indifferently with the strongest, or with ordinary powers. 
Homer surpasses all men in this quality: but strangely 35 

1 Fdbulo8U8 Hydaspes ! 



22 CARLYLE 

enough, at no great distance below him are Richardson 
and Defoe. It belongs, in truth, to what is called a lively 
mind; and gives no sure indication of the higher endow- 
ments that may exist along with it. In all the three cases 

5 we have mentioned, it is combined with great garrulity; 
their descriptions are detailed, ample and lovingly exact; 
Homer's fire bursts through, from time to time, as if by 
accident ; but Defoe and Richardson have no fire. Burns, 
again, is not more distinguished by the clearness than by 

10 the impetuous force of his conceptions. Of the strength, 
the piercing emphasis with which he thought, his emphasis 
of expression may give a humble but the readiest proof. 
Who ever uttered sharper sayings than his; words more 
memorable, now by their burning vehemence, now by their 

15 cool vigor and laconic pith? A single phrase depicts a 
whole subject, a whole scene. We hear of "a gentleman 
that derived his patent of nobility direct from Almighty 
God." Our Scottish forefathers in the battle-field strug- 
gled forward "red-wat-shod" •' in this one word a full 

20 vision of horror and carnage, perhaps too frightfully ac- 
curate for Art ! 

y ^ In fact, one of the leading features in the mind of 
Burns is this vigox-of his strictly intellectual perceptions. 
A resolute force is ever visible in his judgments, and in 

25 his feelings and volitions. Professor Stewart says of him, 
with some surprise: "All the faculties of Burns's mind 
were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous; and his 
predilection for poetry was rather the result of his own 
enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius ex- 

30 clusively adapted to that species of composition. From 
his conversation I should have pronounced him to be fitted 
to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to 
exert his abilities." But this, if we mistake not, is at all 
times the very essence of a truly poetical endowment. 

35 Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the 
whole consists in a weak-eyed maudlin sensibility, and a 
certain vague random tunefulness of nature, is no sepa- 
rate faculty, no organ which can be superadded to the 



BURNS 23 

rest, or disjoined from them ; but rather the result of their 
general harmony and completion. The feelings, the gifts 
that exist in the Poet are those that exist, with more or i 
less development, in every human soul: the imagination, 
which shudders at the Hell of Dante, is the same faculty, 5 
weaker in degree, which called that picture into being. 
How does the Poet speak to men, with power, but by be- 
ing still more a man than they? Shakespeare, it has been 
well observed, in the planning and completing of his trag- 
edies, has shown an Understanding, were it nothing more, 10 
which might have governed states, or indited a "Novum 
Organum." What Burns's force of understanding may 
have been, we have less means of judging : it had to dwell 
among the humblest objects; never saw Philosophy; never 
rose, except by natural effort and for short intervals, into 15 
the region of great ideas. Nevertheless, sufficient indica- 
tion, if no proof sufficient, remains for us in his works: 
we discern the brawny movements of a gigantic though 
untutored strength; and can understand how, in conversa- 
tion, his quick sure insight into men and things may, as 20 
much as aught else about him, have amazed the best 
thinkers of his time and country. ff ^tirfi ^ ft-t - *&» ^ **4r*\ 
Vr jBut, unless we mistake, the inteliectuM"gif t of Burns is ^f 
fine as well as strong. The more delicate relations of 
things could not well have escaped his eye, for they were 25 
intimately present to his heart. The logic of the senate 
and the forum is indispensable, but not all-sufficient; nay, 
perhaps the highest Truth is that which will the most cer- 
tainly elude it. For this logic works by words, and "the 
highest," it has been said, "cannot be expressed in words." 30 
We are not without tokens of an openness for this higher 
truth also, of a keen though uncultivated sense for it, hav- 
ing existed in Burns. Mr. Stewart, it will be remembered, 
"wonders," in the passage above quoted, that Burns had 
formed some distinct conception of the "doctrine of asso- 35 
ciation." We rather think that far subtler things than 
the doctrine of association had from of old been familiar 
to him. Here for instance: 



/. 



24 • CAELYLE 

}?Jy ' l We know nothing, ' ' thus writes he, ' * or next to nothing, 
f jrof the structure of our souls, so we cannot account for those 
jA seeming caprices in them, that one should be particularly 
pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which, on minds 
5 of a different cast, makes no extraordinary impression. I 
have some favorite flowers in spring, among which are the 
mountain-daisy, the harebell, the foxglove, the wild-brier rose, 
the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and 
hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud soli- 
10 tary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mix- 
ing cadence of a troop of gray plover in an autumnal morn- 
ing, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm 
of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can 
this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the 
15 ^olian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing ac- 
cialttit; or do these workings argue something within us above 
the "trodden clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of 
those awful and important realities : a God that made all 
things, man 's immaterial and immortal nature, and a world of 
20 weal or wo beyond death and the grave." 

^^ Force and fineness of understanding are often spoken 
of as something different from general force and fineness 
of nature, as something partly independent of them. The 
necessities of language so require it; but in truth these 

25 qualities are not distinct and independent: except in spe- 
cial cases, and from special causes, they ever go together. 
A man of strong understanding is generally a man of 
strong character; neither is delicacy in the one kind often 
divided from delicacy in the other. No one, at all events, 

30 is ignorant that in the Poetry of Burns keenness of in- 
sight keeps pace with keenness of feeling ; that his light is 
not more pervading than his warmth. He is a man of the 
most impassioned temper; with passions not strong only, 
but noble, and of the sort in which great virtues and great 

35 poems take their rise. It is reverence, it is love towards 
all Nature that inspires him, that opens his eyes to its 
beauty, and makes heart and voice eloquent in its praise. 
There is a true old saying, that "Love furthers know- 
ledge" : but above all, it is the living essence of that know- 

40 ledge which makes poets; the first principle of its exist- 



BURNS 25 

ence, increase, activity. Of Burns's fervid affection, his 
generous all-embracing Love, we have spoken already, as 
of the grand distinction of his nature, seen equally in 
word and deed, in his Life and in his Writings. It were 
easy to multiply examples. Not man only, but all that 5 
environs man in the material and moral universe, is lovely 
in his sight: "the hoary hawthorn," the "troop of gray 
plover," the "solitary curlew," all are dear to him; all 
live in this Earth along with him, and to all he is knit as 
in mysterious brotherhood. How touching is it, for in- 10 
stance, that, amidst the gloom of personal misery, brood- 
ing over the wintry desolation without him and within 
him, he thinks of the "ourie cattle" and "silly sheep," and 
their sufferings in the pitiless storm ! 

"I thought me on the ourie cattle, 15 

Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 

O' wintry war, 
Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, 

Beneath a scaur. 
Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing, 20 

That in the merry months o ' spring 
Delighted me to hear thee sing, 

What comes o f thee ? 
Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, 

And close thy ee?" 25 

*2JWhe tenant of the mean hut, with its "ragged roof and 
chinky wall," has a heart to pity even these! This is 
worth several homilies on Mercy; for it is the voice of 
Mercy herself. Burns, indeed, lives in sympathy; his soul 
rushes forth into all realms of being; nothing that has 30 
existence can be indifferent to him. The very Devil he 
cannot hate with right orthodoxy : 

1 ' But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben ; 
O, wad ye tak a thought and men'! 
Ye aiblins might,— I dinna ken,— 35 

Still hae a stake; 
I ? m wae to think upo ' yon den, 

Even for your sake \" 



26 CARLYLE 

"He is the father of curses and lies," said Dr. Slop; 
"and is cursed and damned already."— "I am sorry for 
it," quoth my Uncle Toby!— a Poet without Love were a 
physical and metaphysical impossibility. 

5 w ^\But has it not been said, in contradiction to this prin- 
ciple, that "Indignation makes verses"? It has been so 
said, and is true enough: but the contradiction is appar- 
ent, not real. The Indignation which makes verses is, 
properly speaking, an inverted Love ; the love of some 

10 right, some worth, some goodness, belonging to ourselves 
or others, which has been injured, and which this tem- 
pestuous feeling issues forth to defend and avenge. No 
selfish fury of heart, existing there as a primary feeling, 
and without its opposite, ever produced much Poetry: 

15 otherwise, we suppose, the Tiger were the most musical of 
all our choristers. Johnson said, he loved a good hater; 
by which he must have meant, not so much one that hated 
violently, as one that hated wisely; hated baseness from 
love of nobleness. However, in spite of Johnson's para- 

20 dox, tolerable enough for once in speech, but which need 
not have been so often adopted in print since then, we 
rather believe that good men deal sparingly in hatred, 
either wise or unwise: nay that a "good" hater is still a 
desideratum in this world. The Devil, at least, who passes 

25 for the chief and best of that class, is said to be nowise 

an amiable character. 

►*&Of the verses which Indignation makes, Burns has also 

given us specimens: and among the best that were ever 

given. Who will forget his "Dweller in yon Dungeon 

30 dark" ; a piece that might have been chanted by the Furies 
of iEschylus? The secrets of the Infernal Pit are laid 
bare; a boundless baleful "darkness visible"; and streaks 
of hell-fire quivering madly in its black haggard bosom! 

11 Dweller in yon Dungeon dark, 
35 Hangman of Creation, mark! 

Who in widow's weeds appears, 
Laden with unhonored years, 






BURNS 27 

Noosing with care a bursting purse, 
Baited with many a deadly curse ! ' ' 

MWhy should we speak of "Scots wha hae wi* Wallace 
bled" ; since all know of it, from the king to the jneanest 
of his subjects? This dithyrambic was composed on 5 
horseback; in riding in the middle of tempests, over the 
wildest Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, who, 
observing the poet's looks, forbore to speak,— judiciously 
enough, for a man composing "Bruce's Address" might be 
unsafe to trifle with. Doubtless this stern hymn was 10 
singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns : 
but to the external ear, it should be sung with the throat 
of the whirlwind. So long as there is warm blood in the 
heart of Scotchman or man, it will move in fierce thrills 
under this war-ode; the best, we believe, that was ever 15 
written by any pen. 
JJ ^Another wild stormf ul Song, that dwells in our ear and 
mind with a strange tenacity, is "Macpherson's Farewell." 
Perhaps there is something in the tradition itself that 
cooperates. For was not this grim Celt, this shaggy 20 
Northland Cacus, that "lived a life of sturt and strife, and 
died by treacherie,"— was not he too one of the Nimrods 
and Napoleons of the earth, in the arena of his own re- 
mote misty glens, for want of a clearer and wider one? 
Nay, was there not a touch of grace given him? A fibre 25 
of love and softness, of poetry itself, must have lived in 
his savage heart : for he composed that air the night be- 
fore his execution; on the wings of that poor melody his 
better soul would soar away above oblivion, pain and all 
the ignominy and despair, which, like an avalanche, was 30 
hurling him to the abyss ! Here also, as at Thebes, and in 
Pelops' line, was material Fate matched against man's Free- 
will ; matched in bitterest though obscure duel ; and the ether- 
eal soul sank not, even in its blindness, without a cry which 
has survived it. But who, except Burns, could have given 35 
words to such a soul; words that we never listen to with- 
out a strange half -barbarous, half -poetic fellow-feeling? 



28 CARLYLE 

"Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, 
Sae dauntingly gaed he; 
He play 'd a spring, and danced it round, 
Below the gallows-tree. ' ' 

5 'J* Under a lighter disguise, the same principle of Love, 
which we have recognized as the great characteristic of 
Burns, and of all true poets, occasionally manifests itself 
in the shape of Humor. Everywhere, indeed, in his 
sunny moods, a full buoyant flood of mirth rolls through 

10 the mind of Burns; he rises to the high, and stoops to the 
low, and is brother and playmate to all Nature. We 
speak not of his bold and often irresistible faculty of cari- 
cature; for this is Drollery rather than Humor: but a 
much tenderer sportfulness dwells in him; and comes 

15 forth here and there, in evanescent and beautiful touches; 
as in his "Address to the Mouse," or the "Farmer's Mare," 
or in his "Elegy on poor Mailie," which last may be reck- 
oned his happiest effort of this kind. In these pieces 
there are traits of a Humor as fine as that of Sterne; yet 

.20 altogether different, original, peculiar,— the Humor of 
Burns. 

* ? *>Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many other 
kindred qualities of Burns's Poetry, much more might be 
said; but now, with these poor outlines of a sketch, we 

25 must prepare to quit this part of our subject. To speak of 
his individual writings, adequately and with any detail, 
would lead us far beyond our limits. As already hinted, 
we can look on but few of these pieces as, in strict critical 
language, deserving the name of Poems: they are rhymed 

30 eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense; yet seldom es- 
sentially melodious, aerial, poetical. 'Tarn o' Shanter'L- 
itself, which enjoys so high a favor, does not appear to us 
at all decisively to come under this last category. It is 
not so much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric; 

35 the heart and body of the story still lies hard and dead. 
He has not gone back, much less carried us back, into 



BURNS 29 

that dark, earnest, wondering age, when the tradition was 
believed, and when it took its rise; he does not attempt, 
by any new-modelling of his supernatural ware, to strike 
anew that deep mysterious chord of human nature, which 
once responded to such things; and which lives in us too, 5 
and will forever live, though silent now, or vibrating with 
far other notes, and to far different issues. Our German 
readers will understand us, when we say, that he is not 
the Tieck but the Musaus of this tale. Externally it is 
all green and living; yet look closer, it is no firm growth, 10 
but only ivy on a rock. The piece does not properly co- 
here: the strange chasm which yawns in our incredulous 
imaginations between the Ayr public-house and the gate 
of Tophet, is nowhere bridged over, nay the idea of such 
a bridge is laughed at; and thus the Tragedy of the ad- 15 
venture becomes a mere drunken phantasmagoria, or 
many-colored spectrum painted on ale-vapors, and the 
Farce alone has any reality. We do not say that Burns 
should have made much more of this tradition ; we rather 
think that, for strictly poetical purposes, not much was 20 
to be made of it. Neither are we blind to the deep, varied, 
genial power displayed in what he has actually accom- 
plished; but we find far more "Shakespearean" qualities, 
as these of " Tarn o* Shanter" have been fondly named, 
in many of his other pieces ; nay, we incline to believe that 25 
this latter might have been written, all but quite as well 
.by a man who, in place of genius, had only possessed 
talent. 

n*\Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most strictly 
poetical of all his "poems" is one which does not appear 30 
in Currie's Edition ; but has been often printed before and 
sirice, under the humble title of "The Jolly^Beggars. , i^ 
The subject truly is among the lowestMn "Mature; buT it 
only the more shows our Poet's gift in raising it into the 
domain of Art. To our minds, this piece seems thoroughly 35 
compacted; melted together, refined; and poured forth in 
one flood of true liquid harmony. It is light, aii^^oft 
of movement; yet sharp and precise in its details; every 



30 CARLYLE 

face is a portrait : that "raucle carlin," that "wee Apollo," 
that "Son of Mars," are Scottish, yet ideal; the scene is 
at once a dream, and the very Ragcastle of "Poosie- 
Nansie." Farther, it seems in a considerable degree com- 

5 plete, a real self-supporting Whole, which is the highest 
merit in a poem. The blanket of the Night is drawn 
asunder for a moment; in full, ruddy, flaming light, these 
rough tatterdemalions are seen in their boisterous revel; 
for the strong pulse of Life vindicates its right to glad- 

10 ness even here; and when the curtain closes, we prolong 
the action, without effort; the next day as the last, our 
"Caird" and our "Balladmonger" are singing and soldier- 
ing; their "brats and callets" are hawking, begging, cheat- 
ing; and some other night, in new combinations, they will 

15 wring from Fate another hour of wassail and good cheer. 
Apart from the universal sympathy with man which this 
again bespeaks in Burns, a genuine inspiration and no 
inconsiderable technical talent are manifested here. There 
is the fidelity, humor, warm life and accurate painting and 

20 grouping of some Teniers, for whom hostlers and carous- 
ing peasants are not without significance. It would be 
strange, doubtless, to call this the best of Burns's writ- 
ings: we mean to say only, that it seems to us the most 
perfect of its kind, as a piece of poetical composition, 

25 strictly so called. In the "Beggars' Opera," in the "Beg- 
gars' Bush," as other critics have already remarked, there 
is nothing which, in real poetic vigor, equals this Can- 
tata; nothing, as we think, which comes within many 
degrees of it. 

3<A^But by far the most finished, complete and truly inspired 
' pieces of Burns are, without dispute, to be found among 
his "Songs." It is here that, although through a small 
aperture, his light shines with least obstruction; in its 
highest beauty and pure sunny clearness. The reason 
35 may *»», fcHt ^ nn ff ™ fli \>™$ gimpta species of compos i- 
tion i ~ ^ requires notlyrifl so vc \\\<ft f^ if G po^pt ipn a s 
genuine p optin fpp1jn^ r genu, fa? rrmsip o f heart! Yet the 



BURNS 31 

Song has its rules equally with the Tragedy; rules which 
in most cases are poorly fulfilled, in many cases are not 
so much as felt. We might write a long essay on the 
Songs of Burns; which we reckon by far the best that 
Britain has yet produced: for indeed, since the era of 5 
Queen Elizabeth, we know not that, by any other hand, 
aught truly worth attention has been accomplished in this 
department. True, we have songs enough "by persons of 
quality"; we have tawdry, hollow, wine-bred madrigals; 
many a rhymed speech "in the flowing and watery vein of 10 
Ossorius the Portugal Bishop," rich in sonorous words, 
and, for moral, dashed perhaps with some tint of a senti- 
mental sensuality; all which many persons cease not from 
endeavoring to sing; though for most part, we fear, the 
music is but from the throat outwards, or at best from 15 
some region far enough short of the Soul; not in which, 
but in a certain inane Limbo of the Fancy, or even in some 
vaporous debatable-land on the outskirts of the Nervous 
System, most of such madrigals and rhymed speeches 
s§£m to have originated. 20 

K^With the Songs of Burns we must not name these 
things. Independently of the cleaj^ manly, heartfelt sen- 
timent that ever pervades his poayty? his Songs are honest 
in another Joint of view: in form, as well as in spirit. 
They do not affect to be set to music, but they actually 25 
and in themselves are music; they have received their life, 
and fashioned themselves together, in the medium of Har- 
mony, as Venus rose from the bosom of the sea. The 
story, the feeling, is not detailed, but suggested; not said, 
or spouted, in rhetorical completeness and coherence; but 30 
sung, in fitful gushes, in glowing hints, in fantastic 
breaks, in warblings not of the voice only, but of the whole 
mind. We consider this to be the essence of a song; and 
that no songs since the little careless catches, and as it 
were drops of song, which Shakespeare has here and there 35 
sprinkled over his plays, fulfil this condition in nearly the 
same degree as most of Burns's do. Such grace and truth 
of external movement, too, presupposes in general a corre- 



I 



32 CARLYLE 

sponding force and truth of sentiment and inward mean- 
ing. The Songs of Burns are not more perfect in the 
former quality than in the latter. With what tenderness 
he sings, yet with what vehemence and entireness ! There 

5 is a piercing wail in his sorrow, the purest rapture in his 
joy; he burns with the sternest ire, or laughs with the 
loudest or sliest mirth; and yet he is sweet and soft, 
"sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, and soft as 
their parting tear." If we farther take into account the 

10 immense variety of his subjects; how, from the loud flow- 
ing revel in "Willie brew'd a Peck o' Maut," to the still, 
rapt enthusiasm of sadness for "Mary in Heaven"; from 
the glad kind greeting of "Auld Langsyne," or the comic 
archness of "Duncan Gray," to the fire-eyed fury of 

15 "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled," he has found a tone 
and words for every mood of man's heart,— it will seem a 
small praise if we rank him as the first of all our Song- 
writers; for we know not where to find one worthy of 
being second to him. 

20 It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns's chief in- 
fluence as an author will ultimately be found to depend: 
nor, if our Fletcher's i&phorism is true, shall we account 
this a small influence. |^p f ™ Q ™<>t™ +^ 
f pi e," said he, "an r| yqu fflml| n^^ft it g laws/| Surely, if 

25 everlmy Toet might have equalled himself with Legisla- 
tors on this ground, it was Burns. His Songs are already 
part of the mother-tongue, not of Scotland only but of 
Britain, and of the millions that in all ends of the earth 
speak a British language. In hut and hall, as the heart 

30 unfolds itself in many-colored joy and woe of existence, 
the name, the voice of that joy and that woe, is the name 
and voice which Burns has given them. Strictly speak- 
ing, perhaps no British man has so deeply affected the 
thoughts and feelings of so many men, as this solitary and 

35 altogether private individual, with means apparently the 
humblest. 

In another point of view, moreoyer, we incline to think 
that Burns's influence may have been considerable: we 



>\ 




^ BURNS -«^ u ■ 

mean, as exerted specially on the Literature of his coun- 
try, at least on the Literature of Scotland,/ Among the 
great changes which British, particularly Scottish litera- 
ture, has undergone since that period, one of the greatest 
will be found to consist in its remarkable increase of 5 
nationality. Even the English writers, most popular in 
Burns's time, were little distinguished for their literary 
patriotism, in this its best sensed A certain attenuated 
cosmopolitanism had, in good measure, taken place of the 
old insular home-feeling; literature was, as it were, with- 10 
out any local environment; was not nourished by the af- 
fections which spring from a native soil. Our Grays and 
Glovers seemed to write almost as if in vacuo; the thing 
written bears no mark of place; it is not written so much 
for Englishmen, as for men; or rather, which is the inev- 15 
itable result of this, for certain generalizations which 
philosophy termed men. (Goldsmith is an exception: not 
so Johnson; the scene 01 s his "Rambler" is little more 
English than that of his "Rasselas." 

But if such was, in some degree, the case with England, 20 
it was, in the highest degree, the case with Scotland. In 
fact, our Scottish literature had, at that period, a very sin- 
gular aspect; unexampled, so far as we know, except per- 
haps at Geneva, where the same state of matters appears 
still to continue. For a long period after Scotland be- 25 
came British, we had no literature : at the date when Addi- 
son and Steele were writing their "Spectators," our good 
John Boston was writing, with the noblest intent, but 
alike in defiance of grammar and philosophy, his "Four- 
fold State of Man." Then came the schisms in our 30 
National Church, and the fiercer schisms in our Body 
Politic; Theologic ink, and Jacobite blood, with gall 
enough in both cases, seemed to have blotted out the intel- 
lect of the country: however, it was only obscured, not 
obliterated. Lord Karnes made nearly the first attempt 35 
at writing English; and ere long, Hume, Robertson, 
Smith, and a whole host of followers, attracted hither the 
eyes of all Europe, And yet in this brilliant resuscitation 




34 



of our "fervid genius," there was nothing truly Scottish, 
nothing indigenous; except, perhaps, the natural impet- 
uosity of intellect, which we sometimes claim, and are 
sometimes upbraided with, as a characteristic of our 

5 nation. It is curious to remark that Scotland, so full of 
writers, had no Scottish culture, nor indeed any English; 
our culture was almost exclusively French. It was by 
studying Racine and Voltaire, Batteux and Boileau, that 
Karnes had trained himself to be a critic and philosopher; 

10 it was the light of Montesquieu and Mably that guided 
Eobertson in his political speculations; Quesnay's lamp 
that kindled the lamp of Adam Smith. Hume was too 
rich a man to borrow; and perhaps he reacted on the 
French more than he was acted on by them: but neither 

15 had he aught to do with Scotland; Edinburgh, equally 
with La Fleche, was but the lodging and laboratory, in 
which he not so much morally lived, as metaphysically 
investigated. Never, perhaps, was there a class of writers 
so clear and well-ordered, yet so totally destitute, to all 

20 appearance, of any patriotic affection, nay of any human 
affection whatever. The French wits of the period were 
as unpatriotic: but their general deficiency in moral prin- 
ciple, not to say their avowed sensuality and unbelief in 
all virtue, strictly so called, render this accountable 

25 enough. We hope, there is a patriotism founded on some- 
thing better than prejudice ; that our country may be dear 
to us, without injury to our philosophy; that in loving 
and justly prizing all other lands, we may prize justly, 
and yet love before all others, our own stern Motherland, 

30 and the venerable structure of social and moral Life, 
which Mind has through long ages been building up for us 
there. Surely there is nourishment for the better part of 
man's heart in all this: surely the roots, that have fixed 
themselves in the very core of man's .being, may be so 

35 cultivated as to grow up not into briers, but into roses ; in 
the field of his life! Our Scottish sages have no such 
propensities: the field of their life shows neither briers 
nor roses j but only a flat, continuous thrashing-floor for 



BURNS 35 

Logic, whereon all questions, from the "Doctrine of Rent" 
to the "Natural History of Religion," are thrashed and 
sifted with the same mechanical impartiality! 

With Sir Walter Scott at the head of our literature, it 
cannot be denied that much of this evil is past, or rapidly 5 
passing away: our chief literary men, whatever other 
faults they may have, no longer live among us like a 
French Colony, or some knot of Propaganda Missionaries ; 
but like natural-born subjects of the soil, partaking and 
sympathizing in all our attachments, humors and habits. 10 
Our literature no longer grows in water but in mould, and 
with the true racy virtues of the soil and climate. How 
much of this change may be due to Burns, or to any other 
individual, it might be difficult to estimate. Direct liter- 
ary imitation of Burns was not to be looked for. But his 15 
example, in the fearless adoption of domestic subjects, 
could not but operate from afar ; and certainly in no heart 
did the love of country ever burn with a warmer glow 
than in that of Burns: "a tide of Scottish prejudice," as 
he modestly calls this deep and generous feeling, "had 20 
been poured along his veins ; and he felt that it would boil 
there till the flood-gates shut in eternal rest." It seemed 
to him, as if he could do so little for his country, and yet 
would so gladly have done all. One small province stood 
open for him,— that of Scottish Song; and how eagerly 25 
he entered on it, how devotedly he labored there! In his 
toilsome journey ings, this object never quits him; it is the 
little happy-valley of his careworn heart. In the gloom 
of his own affliction, he eagerly searches after some lonely 
brother of the muse, and rejoices to snatch one other name 30 
from the oblivion that was covering it ! These were early 
feelings, and they abode with him to the end : 

. . . "A wish (I mind its power), 

A wish, that to my latest hour 

Will strongly heave my breast,— 35 

That I, for poor auld Scotland 's sake, 

Some useful plan or book could make, 

Or sing a sang at least. 



36 CARLYLE 

"The rough bur Thistle spreading wide 
Amang the bearded bear, 
I turn'd my weeding-clips aside, 
And spared the symbol dear. " 

5 . But to leave the mere literary character of Burns, which 

q^vhas already detained us too long. Far more interesting 
than any of his written works, as it appears to us, are his 
acted ones: the Life he willed and was fated to lead 
among his fellow-men. These Poems are but like little 

10 rhymed fragments scattered here and there in the grand 
unrhymed Romance of his earthly existence ; and it is only 
when intercalated in this at their proper places, that they 
attain their full measure of significance. And this, too, 
alas, was but a fragment! The plan of a mighty edifice 

15 had been sketched; some columns, porticos, firm masses 
of building, stand completed; the rest more or less clearly 
indicated ; with many a far-stretching tendency, which only 
studious and friendly eyes can now trace towards the pur- 
posed termination. For the work is broken off in the 

20 middle, almost in the beginning ; and rises among us, beau- 
tiful and sad, at once unfinished and a ruin! If char- 
itable judgment was necessary in estimating his Poems, 
and justice required that the aim and the manifest power 
to fulfil it must often be accepted for the fulfilment, much 

25 more is this the case, in regard to his Life, the sum and 
result of all his endeavors, where his difficulties came 
upon him not in detail only, but in mass, and so much 
' has been left unaccomplished, nay was mistaken, and alto- 
gether marred. 

30 Properly speaking, there is but one era in the life of 
Burns, and that the earliest. We have not youth and 
manhood, but only youth: for, to the end, we discern no 
decisive change in the complexion of his character; in his 
thirty-seventh year, he is still, as it were, in youth. With 

35 all that resoluteness of judgment, that penetrating in- 
sight, and singular maturity of intellectual power, exhib- 
ited in his writings, he never attains to any clearness re- 



*\ 



BURNS 37 

garding himself; to the last, he never ascertains his pecu- 
liar aim, even with such distinctness as is common among 
ordinary men; and therefore never can pursue it with 
that singleness of will, which insures success and some 
contentment to such men. To the last, he wavers between 5 
two purposes: glorying in his talent, like a true poet, he 
yet cannot consent to make this his chief and sole glory, 
and to follow it as the one thing needful, through poverty 
or riches, through good or evil report. Another far meaner 
ambition still cleaves to him; he must dream and struggle 10 
about a certain "Rock of Independence"; which, natural 
and even admirable as it might be, was still but a warring 
with the world, on the comparatively insignificant ground 
of his being more completely or less completely supplied 
with money than others; of his standing at a higher or at 15 
a lower altitude in general estimation than others. For 
the world still appears to him, as to the young, in bor- 
rowed colors: he expects from it what it cannot give to 
any man; seeks for contentment, not within himself, in 
action and wise effort, but from without, in the kindness 20 
of circumstances, in love, friendship, honor, pecuniary 
ease. He would be happy, not actively and in himself, but 
passively and from some ideal cornucopia of Enjoyments, 
not earned by his own labor, but showered on him by the 
beneficence of Destiny. Thus, like a young man, he can- 25 
not gird himself up for any worthy well-calculated goal, 
but swerves to and fro, between passionate hope and re- 
morseful disappointment: rushing onwards with a deep 
tempestuous force, he surmounts or breaks asunder many 
a barrier; travels, nay advances far, but advancing only 30 
under uncertain guidance, is ever and anon turned from 
his path ; and to the last cannot reach the only true happi- 
ness of a man, that of clear decided Activity in the sphere 
for which, by nature and circumstances, he has been fitted 
and appointed. 35 

L|*VWe do not say these things in dispraise of Burns; nay, 
perhaps, they but interest us the more in his favor. This 
blessing is not given soonest to the best; but rather, it is 



38 CAELYLE 

often the greatest minds that are latest in obtaining it; 
for where most is to be developed, most time may be re- 
quired to develop it. A complex condition had been as- 
signed him from without; as complex a condition from 
5 within: no "preestablished harmony" existed between the 
clay soil of Mossgiel and the empyrean soul of Robert 
Burns; it was not wonderful that the adjustment between 
them should have been long postponed, and his arm long 
cumbered, and his sight confused, in so vast and discord- 

10 ant an economy as he had been appointed steward over. 
Byron was, at his death, but a year younger than Burns; 
and through life, as it might have appeared, far more 
simply situated: yet in him too we can trace no such ad- 
justment, no such moral manhood; but at best, and only a 

15 little before his end, the beginning of what seemed such. 

ij^y By much the most striking incident in Burns's Life is 
r his journey to Edinburgh; but perhaps a still more im- 
portant one is his residence at Irvine, so early as in his 
twenty-third year. Hitherto his life had been poor and 

20 toilworn; but otherwise not ungenial, and, with all its 
distresses, by no means unhappy. In his parentage, de- 
ducting outward circumstances, he had every reason to 
reckon himself fortunate. His father was a man of 
thoughtful, intense, earnest character, as the best of our 

25 peasants are; valuing knowledge, possessing some, and 
what is far better and rarer, open-minded for more : a man 
with a keen insight and devout heart; reverent towards 
God, friendly therefore at once, and fearless towards all 
that God has made: in one word, though but a hard- 

30 handed peasant, a complete and fully unfolded Man. 
Such a father is seldom found in any rank in society ; and 
was worth descending far in society to seek. Unfortu- 
nately he was very poor; had he been even a little richer, 
almost never so little, the whole might have issued far 

35 otherwise. Mighty events turn on a straw; the crossing of 
a brook decides the conquest of the world. Had this Wil- 
liam Burns's small seven acres of nursery-ground any- 
wise prospered, the boy Robert had been sent to school; 



BURNS 39 

had struggled forward, as so many weaker men do, to 
some university;. come forth not as a rustic wonder, but as 
a regular well-trained intellectual workman, and changed 
the whole course of British Literature,— for it lay in him 
to have done this! But the nursery did not prosper; 5 
poverty sank his whole family below the help of even our 
cheap school-system: Burns remained a hard-worked 
ploughboy, and British Literature took its own course. 
Nevertheless, even in this rugged scene there is much to 
nourish him. If he drudges, it is with his brother, and 10 
for his father and mother, whom he loves, and would fain 
shield from want. Wisdom is not banished from their 
poor hearth, nor the balm of natural feeling: the solemn 
words, Let us worship God, are heard there from a 
"priest-like father"; if threatenings of unjust men throw is 
mother and children into tears, these are tears not of 
grief only, but of holiest affection; every heart in that 
humble group feels itself the closer knit to ^very other; 
in their hard warfare they are there together, a "little 
band of brethren." Neither are such tears, and the deep 20 
beauty that dwells in them, their only portion. Light 
visits the hearts as it does the eyes of all living: there is 
a force, too, in this youth, that enables him to trample on 
misfortune; nay to bind it under his feet to make him 
sport. For a bold, warm, buoyant humor of character has 25 
been given him; and so .the thick-coming shapes of evil 
are welcomed with a gay, friendly irony, and in their 
closest pressure he bates no jot of heart or hope. Vague 
yearnings of ambition fail not, as he grows up; dreamy 
fancies hang like cloud-cities around him; the curtain of 30 
Existence is slowly rising, in many-colored splendor and 
gloom: and the auroral light of first love is gilding his 
horizon, and the music of song is on his path; and so he 
walks 

"in glory and in joy, 35 

Behind his plough, upon the mountain side. " 

• U We ourselves know, from the best evidence, that up to 



40 CARLYLE 

this date Burns was happy; nay, that he was the gayest, 
brightest, most fantastic, fascinating being to be found in 
the world; more so even than he ever afterwards ap- 
peared. But now, at this early age, he quits the paternal 

5 roof; goes forth into looser, louder, more exciting society; 
and becomes initiated in those dissipations, those vices, 
which a certain class of philosophers have asserted to be 
a natural preparative for entering on active life; a kind 
of mud-bath, in which the youth is, as it were, necessi- 

10 tated to steep, and, we suppose, cleanse himself, before 
the real toga of Manhood can be laid on him. We shall 
not dispute much with this class of philosophers; we hope 
they are mistaken : for Sin and Remorse so easily beset us 
at all stages of life, and are always such indifferent com- 

15 pany, that it seems hard we should, at any stage, be forced 
and fated not only to meet but to yield to them, and even 
serve for a term in their leprous armada. We hope it is 
not so. Clear we are, at all events, it cannot be the train- 
ing one receives in this DeviFs service, but only our deter- 

20 mining to desert from it, that fits us for true manly 
Action. We become men, not after we have been dissi- 
pated, and disappointed in the chase of false pleasure; 
but after we have ascertained, in any way, what impass- 
able barriers hem us in through this life; how mad it is to 

25 hope for contentment to our infinite soul from the gifts 
of this extremely finite world; that a man must be suffi- 
cient for himself; and that for suffering and enduring 
there is no remedy but striving and doing. Manhood be- 
gins when we have in any way made truce with Necessity ; 

30 begins even when we have surrendered to Necessity, as 
the most part only do; but begins joyfully and hopefully 
only when we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity; and 
thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in Neces- 
sity we are free. Surely, such lessons as this last, which, 

35 in one shape or other, is the grand lesson for every mortal 
man, are better learned from the lips of a devout mother, 
in the looks and actions of a devout father, while the heart 
is yet soft and pliant, than in collision with the sharp 



BURNS 41 

adamant of Fate, attracting us to shipwreck us, when the 
heart is grown hard, and may be .broken before it will 
become contrite. Had Burns continued to learn this, as 
he was already learning it, in his father's cottage, he 
would have learned it fully, which he never did ; and been 5 
saved many a lasting aberration, many a bitter hour and 
year of remorseful sorrow. 

lti> It seems to us another circumstance of fatal import in 
Burns's history, that at this time too he became involved 
in the religious quarrels of his district; that he was en- 10 
listed and feasted, as the fighting man of the New-Light 
Priesthood, in their highly unprofitable warfare. At the 
tables of these free-minded clergy he learned much more 
than was needful for him. Such liberal ridicule of fanat- 
icism awakened in his mind scruples about Religion itself; 15 
and a whole world of Doubts, which it required quite an- 
other set of conjurers than these men to exorcise. We 
do not say that such an intellect as his could have escaped 
similar doubts at some period of his history; or even that 
he could, at a later period, have come through them alto- 20 
gether victorious and unharmed: but it seems peculiarly 
unfortunate that this time, above all others, should have 
been fixed for the encounter. For now, with principles 
assailed by evil example from without, by "passions rag- 
ing like demons" from within, he had little need of seep- 25 
tical misgivings to whisper treason in the heat of the 
battle, or to cut off his retreat if he were already de- 
feated. He loses his feeling of innocence; his mind is 
at variance with itself; the old divinity no longer presides 
there; but wild Desires and wild Repentance alternately 30 
oppress him. Ere long, too, he has committed himself 
before the world; his character for sobriety, dear to a 
Scottish peasant as few corrupted worldlings can even 

, conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men; and his only ref- 
uge consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, and is 35 
but a refuge of lies. The blackest desperation now gath- 
ers over him, broken only by red lightnings of remorse. 
The whole fabric of his life is blasted asunder; for now 



42 CARLYLE 

not only his character, but his personal liberty, is to be 
lost; men and Fortune are leagued for his hurt; "hungry 
Ruin has him in the wind." He sees no escape but the 
saddest of all : exiled from his loved country, to a country 
5 in every sense inhospitable and abhorrent to him. While 
the "gloomy night is gathering fast," in mental storm and 
solitude, as well as in physical, he sings his wild farewell 
to Scotland: 

"Farewell, my friends; farewell, my foes! 
10 My peace with these, my love with those: 

The bursting tears my heart declare; 
Adieu, my native banks of Ayr ! ' ' 

Height breaks suddenly in on him in floods; but still a 
false transitory light, and no real sunshine. He is invited 

15 to Edinburgh; hastens thither with anticipating heart; is 
welcomed as in a triumph, and with universal blandish- 
ment and acclamation; whatever is wisest, whatever is 
greatest or loveliest there, gathers round him, to gaze on 
his face, to show him honor, sympathy, affection. Burns's 

20 appearance among the sages and nobles of Edinburgh 
must be regarded as one of the most singular phenomena 
in modern Literature; almost like the appearance of some 
Napoleon among the crowned sovereigns of modern Poli- 
tics. For it is nowise as "a mockery king," set there by 

25 favor, transiently and for a purpose, that he will let him- 
self be treated; still less is he a mad Rienzi, whose sud- 
den elevation turns his too weak head : but he stands there 
on his own basis; cool, unastonished, holding his equal 
rank from Nature herself; putting forth no claim which 

30 there is not strength in him, as well as about him, to vindi- 
cate. Mr. Lockhart has some forcible observations on this 
point : 

t ' It needs no effort of imagination, ' ' says he, ' c to conceive 
what the sensations of an isolated set of scholars (almost all 
35 either clergymen or professors) must have been in the pres- 
ence of this big-boned, black-browed, brawny stranger, with 






BURNS 43 

his great flashing eyes, who, having forced hia way among 
them from the plough-tail at a single stride, manifested in the 
whole strain of his bearing and conversation a most thorough 
conviction, that in the society of the most eminent men of 
his nation he was exactly where he was entitled to be; hardly 5 
deigned to flatter them by exhibiting even an occasional symp- 
tom of being flattered by their notice; by turns calmly meas- 
ured himself against the most cultivated understandings of 
his time in discussion; overpowered the ton mots of the most 
celebrated convivialists by broad floods of merriment, im- 10 
pregnated with all the burning life of genius; astounded 
bosoms habitually enveloped in the thrice-piled folds of social 
reserve, by compelling them to tremble, — nay, to tremble 
visibly,— beneath the fearless touch of natural pathos; and 
all this without indicating the smallest willingness to be 15 
ranked among those professional ministers of excitement, who 
are content to be paid in money and smiles for doing what 
the spectators and auditors would be ashamed of doing in 
their own persons, even if they had the power of doing it; 
and last, and probably worst of all, who was known to be in 20 
the habit of enlivening societies which they would have 
scorned to approach, still more frequently than their own, 
with eloquence no less magnificent; with wit, in all likelihood 
still more daring ; often enough, as the superiors whom he 
fronted without alarm might have guessed from the begin- 25 
ning, and had ere long no occasion to guess, with wit pointed 
at themselves." 



^f7The farther we remove from this scene, the more sin- 
gular will it seem to us: details of the exterior aspect of 
it are already full of interest. Most readers recollect Mr. 30l 
Walker's personal interviews with Burns as among the 
best passages of his Narrative: a time will come when 
this reminiscence of Sir Walter Scott's, slight though it 
is, will also be precious: 

"As for Burns, " writes Sir Walter, "I may truly say, 35 
Virgilium vidi tantilm. I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-7, 
when he first came to Edinburgh, but had sense and feeling 
enough to be much interested in his poetry, and would have 
given the world to know him: but I had very little acquaint- 



44 CARLYLE 

ance with any literary people, and still less with the gentry 
of the west country, the two sets that he most frequented. 
Mr. Thomas Grierson was at that time a clerk of my father 's. 
He knew Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodgings to 

5 dinner; but had no opportunity to keep his word; otherwise 
I might have seen more of this distinguished man. As it was, 
I saw him one day at the late venerable Professor Ferguson 's, 
where there were several gentlemen of literary reputation, 
among whom I remembered the celebrated Mr. Dugald Stew- 

10 art. Of course, we youngsters sat silent, looked and listened. 
The only thing I remember which was remarkable in Burns 's 
manner, was the effect produced upon him by a print of Bun- 
bury % representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his 
dog sitting in misery on one side,— on the other, his widow, 

15 with a child in her arms. These lines were written beneath: 

" 'Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, 
Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain; 
Bent o 'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, 
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, 
20 Gave the sad presage of his future years, 

The child of misery baptised in tears.' - 

"Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather by 
the ideas which it suggested to his mind. He actually shed 
tears. He asked whose the lines were; and it chanced that 

25 nobody but myself remembered that they occur in a half- 
forgotten poem of Langhorne's called by the unpromising 
title of 'The Justice of Peace.' I whispered my information 
to a friend present; he mentioned it to Burns, who re- 
warded me with a look and a word, which, though of mere 

30 civility, I then received and still recollect with very great 
pleasure. 

"His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, 
not clownish ; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which 
received part of its effect perhaps from one *s knowledge of his 

35 extraordinary talents. His features are represented in Mr. 
Nasmyth's picture: but to me it conveys the idea that they 
are diminished, as if seen in perspective. I think his coun- 
tenance was more massive than it looks in any of the por- 
traits. I should have taken the poet, had I not known what 

40 he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old 



BURNS 45 

Scotch school, i.e., none of your modern agriculturists who 
keep labourers for their drudgery, but the douce gudeman 
who held his own plough. There was a strong expression of 
sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I 
think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It 5 
was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say literally 
glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw 
such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the 
most distinguished men of my time. His conversation ex- 
pressed perfect self-confidence, without the slightest pre- 10 
sumption. Among the men who were the most learned of 
their time and country, he expressed himself with perfect 
firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness; and 
when he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to express it 
firmly, yet at the same time with modesty. I do not remem- 15 
ber any part of his conversation distinctly enough to be 
quoted; nor did I ever see him again, except in the street, 
where he did not recognise me, as I could not expect he 
should. He was much caressed in Edinburgh: but (consid- 
ering what literary emoluments have been since his day) the 20 
efforts made for his relief were extremely trifling. 

' ' I remember, on this occasion I mention, I thought Burns 's 
acquaintance with English poetry was rather limited; and 
also that, having twenty times the abilities of Allan Eamsay 
and of Ferguson, he talked of them with too much humility 25 
as his models: there was doubtless national predilection in 
his estimate. 

"This is all I can tell you about Burns. I have only to 
add, that his dress corresponded with his manner. He was 
like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with the laird. I 30 
do not speak in malam partem, when I say, I never saw a 
man in company with his superiors in station or information 
more perfectly free from either the reality or the affectation 
of embarrassment. I was told, but did not observe it, that 
his address to females was extremely deferential, and always 35 
with a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which en- 
gaged their attention particularly. I have heard the late 
Duchess of Gordon remark this.— I do not know anything I 
Vgan add to these recollections of forty years since." 

*|X The conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze of 40 
favor; the calm, unaffected, manly manner in which he 



46 CARLYLE 

not only bore it, but estimated its value, has justly been re- 
garded as the best proof that could be given of his real 
vigor and integrity of mind. A little natural vanity, some 
touches of hypocritical modesty, some glimmerings of af- 

5 f ectation, at least some fear of being thought affected, we 
could have pardoned in almost any man ; but no such indi- 
cation is to be traced here. In his unexampled situation 
the young peasant is not a moment perplexed; so many 
strange lights do not confuse him, do not lead him astray. 

10 Nevertheless, we cannot but perceive that this winter did 
him great and lasting injury. A somewhat clearer know- 
ledge of men's affairs, scarcely of their characters, it did 
afford him; but a sharper feeling of Fortune's unequal 
arrangements in their social destiny it also left with him. 

15 He had seen the gay and gorgeous arena, in which the 
powerful are born to play their parts; nay had himself 
stood in the midst of it; and he felt more bitterly than 
ever, that here he was but a looker-on, and had no part or 
lot in that splendid game. From this time a jealous indig- 

20 nant fear of social degradation takes possession of him; 
and perverts, so far as aught could pervert, his private 
contentment, and his feelings towards his richer fellows. 
It was clear to Burns that he had talent enough to make 
a fortune, or a hundred fortunes, could he but have 

25 rightly willed this; it was clear also that he willed some- 
thing far different, and therefore could not make one. 
Unhappy it was that he had not power to choose the one, 
and reject the other; but must halt forever between two 
opinions, two objects; making hampered advancement 

30 towards either. But so it is with many men: we "long 

for the merchandise, yet would fain keep the price"; and 

so stand chaffering with Fate, in vexatious altercation, 

till the night come, and our fair is over! 

W*\ The Edinburgh Learned of that period were in gen- 

35 eral more noted for clearness of head than for warmth 
of heart: with the exception of the good old Blacklock, 
whose help was too ineffectual, scarcely one among them 
seems to have looked at Burns with any true sympathy, or 



BURNS 47 

indeed much otherwise than as at a highly curious thing. 
By the great also he is treated in the customary fashion; 
entertained at their tables and dismissed: certain modica 
of pudding and praise are, from time to time, gladly ex- 
changed for the fascination of his presence; which ex- 5 
change once effected, the bargain is finished, and each 
party goes his several way. At the end of this strange 
season, Burns gloomily sums up his gains and losses, and 
meditates on the chaotic future. In money he is somewhat 
richer; in fame and the show of happiness, infinitely 10 
richer; but in the substance of it, as poor as ever. Nay 
poorer; for his heart is now maddened still more with the 
fever of worldly Ambition; and through long years the 
disease will rack him with unprofitable sufferings, and 
weaken his strength for all true and nobler aims. 15 

^DWhat Burns was next to do or to avoid, how a man so 
circumstanced was now to guide himself towards his true 
advantage, might at this point of time have been a ques- 
tion for the wisest. It was a question too, which appar- 
ently he was left altogether to answer for himself: of his 20 
learned or rich patrons it had not struck any individual 
to turn a thought on this so trivial matter. Without 
claiming for Burns the praise of perfect sagacity, we 
must say, that his Excise and Farm scheme does not seem 
to us a very unreasonable one; that we should be at a 25 
loss, even now, to suggest one decidedly better. Certain 
of his admirers have felt scandalized at his ever resolving 
to gauge; and would have had him lie at the pool, till the 
spirit of Patronage stirred the waters, that so, with one 
friendly plunge, all his sorrows might be healed. Unwise 30 
counsellors! They know not the manner of this spirit; 
and how, in the lap of most golden dreams, a man might 
have happiness, were it not that in the interim he must 
die of hunger! It reflects credit on the manliness and 
sound sense of Burns, that he felt so early on what ground 35 
he was standing; and preferred self-help, on the humblest 
scale, to dependence and inaction, though with hope of 
far more splendid possibilities. But even these possibili- 



48 CARLYLE 

ties were not rejected in his scheme: he might expect, if 
it chanced that he had any friend, to rise, in no long 
period, into something even like opulence and leisure; 
while again, if it chanced that he had no friend, he could 

5 still live in security; and for the rest, he "did not intend 
to borrow honour from any profession." We reckon that 
his plan was honest and well-calculated: all turned on 
the execution of it. Doubtless it failed; yet not, we be- 
lieve, from any vice inherent in itself. Nay, after all, it 

10 was no failure of external means, but of internal, that 
overtook Burns. His was no bankruptcy of the purse, 
but of the soul; to his last day, he owed no man any- 
thing. 
"£\ Meanwhile he begins well: with two good and wise 

15 actions. His donation to his mother, munificent from a 
man whose income had lately been seven pounds a year, 
was worthy of him, and not more than worthy. Generous 
also, and worthy of him, was the treatment of the woman 
whose life's welfare now depended on his pleasure. A 

20 friendly observer might have hoped serene days for him: 
his mind is on the true road to peace with itself: what 
clearness he still wants will be given as he proceeds; for 
the best teacher of duties, that still lie dim to us, is 
the practice of those we see and have at hand. Had the 

25 "patrons of genius," who could give him nothing, but 
taken nothing from him, at least nothing more! The 
wounds of his heart would have healed, vulgar ambition 
would have died away. Toil and Frugality would 'have 
been welcome, since Virtue dwelt with them; and Poetry 

30 would have shone through them as of old : and in her clear 
ethereal light, which was his own by birthright, he might 
have looked down on his earthly destiny, and all its ob- 
structions, not with patience only, but with love. 

But the patrons of genius would not have it so. Pic- 

35 turesque tourists, 1 all manner of fashionable danglers after 

1 There is one little sketch by certain "English gentlemen" of this 
class, which, though adopted in Ourrie's Narrative, and since then 
repeated in most others, we have all along felt an invincible dispo- 
sition to regard as imaginary: "On a rock that projected into the 



BURNS 49 

literature, and, far worse, all manner of convivial Maece- 
nases, hovered round him in his retreat; and his good 
as well as his weak qualities secured them influence over 
him. He was flattered by their notice; and his warm so- 
cial nature made it impossible for him to shake them off, 5 
and hold on his way apart from them. These men, as we 
believe, were proximately the means of his ruin. Not 
that they meant him any ill ; they only meant themselves a 
little good ; if he suffered harm, let him look to it ! But 
they wasted his precious time and his precious talent ; they 10 
disturbed his composure, broke down his returning habits 
of temperance and assiduous contented exertion. Their 
pampering was baneful to him; their cruelty, which soon 
followed, was equally baneful. The old grudge against 
Fortune's inequality awoke with new bitterness in their 15 
neighborhood; and Burns had no retreat but to "the 
Rock of Independence," which is but an air-castle after 
all, that looks well at a distance, but will screen no one 
from real wind and wet. Flushed with irregular excite- 
ment, exasperated alternately by contempt of others, and 20 
contempt of himself, Burns was no longer regaining his 
peace of mind, but fast losing it forever. There was a 
hollowness at the heart of his life, for his conscience did 
not now approve what he was doing. 

' *>Amid the vapors of unwise enjoyment, of bootless re- 25 
morse, and angry discontent with Fate, his true loadstar, 
a life of Poetry, with Poverty, nay with Famine if it must 
be so, was too often altogether hidden from his eyes. And 
yet he sailed a sea, where without some such loadstar there 
was no right steering. Meteors of French politics rise 30 

stream, they saw a man employed in angling, of a singular appear- 
ance. He had a cap made of fox-skin on his head, a loose greatcoat 
fixed round him by a belt, from which depended an enormous High- 
land broad-sword. It was Burns." Now, we rather think, it was 
not Burns. For, to say nothing of the fox-skin cap, the loose and 
quite Hibernian watchcoat with the belt, what are we to make of this 
"enormous Highland broad-sword" depending from him? More 
especially, as there is no word of parish constables on the outlook to 
see whether, as Dennis phrases it, he had an eye to his own midriff 
or that of the public I Burns, of all men, had the least need, and 
the least tendency, to seek for distinction, either in his own eyes, or 
those of others, by such poor mummeries 



50 CARLYLE 

before him, but these were not his stars. An accident 
this, which hastened, but did not originate, his worst dis- 
tresses. In the mad contentions of that time, he comes 
in collision with certain official superiors; is wounded by 
5 them; cruelly lacerated, we should say, could a dead me- 
chanical implement, in any case, be called cruel: and 
shrinks, in indignant pain, into deeper self -seclusion, into 
gloomier moodiness than ever. His life has now lost its 
unity: it is a life of fragments; led with little aim, be- 

10 yond the melancholy one of securing its own continu- 
ance,— in fits of wild false joy when such offered, and of 
black despondency when they passed away. His charac- 
ter before the world begins to suffer: calumny is busy 
with him; for a miserable man makes more enemies than 

15 friends. Some faults he has fallen into, and a thousand 
misfortunes; but deep criminality is what he stands ac- 
cused of, and they that are not without sin cast the first 
stone at him! For is he not a well-wisher to the French 
Revolution, a Jacobin, and therefore in that one act guilty 

20 of all ? These accusations, political and moral, it has since 
appeared, were false enough : but the world hesitated little 
to credit them. Nay, his convivial Maecenases themselves 
were not the last to do it. There is reason to believe that, 
in his later years, the Dumfries Aristocracy had partly 

25 withdrawn themselves from Burns, as from a tainted per- 
son, no longer worthy of their acquaintance. That pain- 
ful class, stationed, in all provincial cities, behind the out- 
most breastwork of Gentility, there to stand siege and do 
battle against the intrusions of Grocerdom and Grazier- 

30 dom, had actually seen dishonor in the society of Burns, 
and branded him with their veto ; had, as we vulgarly say, 
cut him ! We find one passage in this Work of Mr. Lock- 
hart's., which will not out of our thoughts: 

"A gentleman of that county, whose name I have already 
35 more than once had occasion to refer to, has often told me 
that he was seldom more grieved, than when riding into Dum- 
fries one fine summer evening about this time to attend a 



BURNS 51 

county ball, he saw Burns walking alone, on the shady side of 
the principal street of the town, while the opposite side was 
gay with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all 
drawn together for the festivities of the night, not one of 
whom appeared willing to recognise him. The horseman dis- 5 
mounted, and joined Burns, who on his proposing to cross 
the street said: 'Nay, nay, my young friend, that *s all over 
now' j and quoted, after a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzel 
Baillie's pathetic ballad: ' , 

"His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow, 10 

His auld ane lookM better than mony ane's new; 
But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing, 
And casts himsell dowie upon the corn-bing. 

1 ' O, were we young as we ance hae been, 
We sud hae been gallopping down on yon green, 15 

And linking it ower the lily-white lea! 
And werena my heart light, I wad die. 9 

It was little in Burns 's character to let his feelings on cer- 
tain subjects escape in this fashion. He, immediately after 
reciting these verses, assumed the sprightliness of his most 20 
pleasing manner; and taking his young friend home with him, 
entertained him very agreeably till the hour of the ball ar- 
rived. ' ' 

Alas! when we think that Burns now sleeps "where 
bitter indignation can no longer lacerate his heart/' 1 and 25 
that most of those fair dames and frizzled gentlemen al- 
ready lie at his side, where the breastwork of gentility is 
quite thrown down,— who would not sigh over the thin de- 
lusions and foolish toys that divide heart from heart, and 
make man unmerciful to his brother ! 30 

^%It was not now to be hoped that the genius of Burns 
would ever reach maturity, or accomplish aught worthy of 
itself. His spirit was jarred in its melody; not the soft 
breath of natural feeling, but the rude hand of Fate, was 
now sweeping over the strings. And yet what harmony 33 

1 Ubi sceva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. Swift's Epitaph. 



52 CARLYLE 

was in him, what music even in his discords! How the 
wild tones had a charm for the simplest and the wisest; 
and all men felt and knew that here also was one of the 
Gifted! "If he entered an inn at midnight, after all the 
5 inmates were in bed, the news of his arrival circulated 
from the cellar to the garret; and ere ten minutes had 
elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were assembled !" 
Some brief pure moments of poetic life were yet appointed 
him, in the composition of his Songs. We can understand 

10 how he grasped at this employment; and how too, he 
spurned all other reward for it but what the labor itself 
brought him. For the soul of Burns, though scathed and 
marred, was yet living in its full moral strength, though 
sharply conscious of its errors and abasement: and here, 

15 in his destitution and degradation, was one act of seeming 
nobleness and self-devotedness left even for him to per- 
form. He felt too, that with all the "thoughtless follies" 
that had "laid him low," the world was unjust and cruel to 
him; and he silently appealed to another and calmer time. 

20 Not as a hired soldier, but as a patriot, would he strive 
for the glory of his country : so he cast from him the poor 
sixpence a day, and served zealously as a volunteer. Let 
us not grudge him this last luxury of his existence ; let him 
not have appealed to us in vain! The money was not 

25 necessary to him; he struggled through without it: long 

since, these guineas would have been gone, and now the 

high-mindedness of refusing them will plead for him in 

all hearts forever. 

/H We are here arrived at the crisis of Burns's life; for 

30 matters had now taken such a shape with him as could not 
long continue. If improvement was not to be looked for, 
Nature could only for a limited time maintain this dark 
and maddening warfare against the world and itself. We 
are not medically informed whether any continuance of 

35 years was, at this period, probable for Burns; whether his 
death is to be looked on as in some sense an accidental 
event, or only as the natural consequence of the long series 
of events that had preceded. The latter seems to be the 




1 



BURNS 53 



l ! 



likelier opinion; and yet it is by no means a certain one. 
At all events, as we have said, some change could not be 
very distant. Three gates of deliverance, it seems to us, 
were open for Burns: clear poetical activity; madness; 
or death. The first, with longer life, was still possible, 5 
though not probable; for physical causes were beginning 
to be concerned in it: and yet Burns had an iron resolu- 
tion; could he but have seen and felt, that not only his 
highest glory, but his first duty, and the true medicine for 
all his woes, lay here. The second was still less probable; 10 
for his mind was ever among the clearest and firmest. So 
the milder third gate was opened for him : and he passed, 
not softly yet speedily, into that still country, where the 
hail-storms and fire-showers do not reach, and the heaviest- 
laden wayfarer at length lays down his load ! 15 



if Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how he sank 
unaided by any real help, uncheered by any wise sym- 
pathy, generous minds have sometimes figured to them- 
selves, with a reproachful sorrow, that much might have 
been done for him; that by counsel, true affection and 20 
friendly ministrations, he might have been saved to him- 
self and the world. We question whether there is not 
more tenderness of heart than soundness of judgment in 
these suggestions. It seems dubious to us whether the 
richest, wisest, most benevolent individual could have lent 25 
Burns any effectual help. Counsel, which seldom profits 
any one, he did not need; in his understanding, he knew 
the right from the wrong, as well perhaps as any man ever 
did; but the persuasion, which would have availed him, 
lies not so much in the head as in the heart, where no ar- 30 
gument or expostulation could have assisted much to im- 
plant it. As to money again, we do not believe that this 
was his essential want; or well see how any private man 
could, even presupposing Burns's consent, have bestowed 
on him an independent fortune, with much prospect of 35 
decisive advantage. It is a mortifying truth, that two 
men in any rank of society, could hardly be found virtuous 



54 CARLYLE 

enough to give money, and to take it as a necessary gift, 
without injury to the moral entireness of one or both. 
But so stands the fact : Friendship, in the old heroic sense 
of that term, no longer exists; except in the cases of kin- 

5 dred or other legal affinity, it is in reality no longer ex- 
pected, or recognized as a virtue among men. A close ob- 
server of manners has pronounced "Patronage," that is, 
pecuniary or other economic furtherance, to be "twice 
cursed" ; cursing him that gives, and him that takes ! And 

10 thus, in regard to outward matters also, it has become the 
rule, as in regard to inward it always was and nnist be the 
rule, that no one shall look for effectual help to another; 
but that each shall rest contented with what help he can 
afford himself. Such, we say, is the principle of modern 

15 Honor; naturally enough growing out of that sentiment of 
Pride, which we inculcate and encourage as the basis of 
our whole social morality. Many a poet has been poorer 
than Burns; but no one was ever prouder: we may ques- 
tion whether, without great precautions, even a pension 

20 from Royalty would not have galled and encumbered, 

more than actually assisted him. 
, i; Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with an- 
other class of Burns's admirers, who accuse the higher 
ranks among us of having ruined Burns by their selfish 

25 neglect of him. We have already stated our doubts 
whether direct pecuniary help, had it been offered, would 
have been accepted, or could have proved very effectual. 
We shall readily admit, however, that much was to be 
done for Burns; that many a poisoned arrow might have 

30 been warded from his bosom; many an entanglement in 
his path cut asunder by the hand of the powerful; and 
light and heat, shed on him from high places, would have 
made his humble atmosphere more genial; and the softest 
heart then breathing might have lived and died with some 

35 fewer pangs. Nay, we shall grant farther, and for Burns 
it is granting much, that, with all his pride, he would 
have thanked, even with exaggerated gratitude, any one 
who had cordially befriended him : patronage, unless once 



BURNS 55 

cursed, needed not to have been twice so. At all events, 
the poor promotion he desired in his calling might have 
been granted: it was his own scheme, therefore likelier 
than any other to be of service. All this might have been 
a luxury, nay it was a duty, for our nobility to have done. 5 
No part of all this, however, did any of them do; or ap- 
parently attempt, or wish to do: so much is granted 
against them. But what then is the amount of their 
blame? Simply that they were men of the world, and 
walked by the principles of such men; that they treated 10 
Burns, as other nobles and other commoners had done 
other poets; as the English did Shakespeare; as King 
Charles and his Cavaliers did Butler, as King Philip and 
his Grandees did Cervantes. Do men gather grapes of 
thorns; or shall we cut down our thorns for yielding only 15 
a fence and haws? How, indeed, could the "nobility and 
gentry of his native land" hold out any help to this 
"Scottish Bard, proud of his name and country"? Were 
the nobility and gentry so much as able rightly to help 
themselves Had they not their game to preserve; their 20 
borough interests to strengthen; dinners, therefore, of 
various kinds to eat and give? Were their means more 
than adequate to all this business, or less than adequate? 
Less than adequate, in general; few of them in reality 
were richer than Burns; many of them were poorer; for 25 
sometimes they had to wring their supplies, as with 
thumbscrews, from the hard hand; and, in their need of 
guineas, to forget their duty of mercy; which Burns was 
never reduced to do. Let us pity and forgive them. The 
game they preserved and shot, the dinners they ate and 30 
gave, the borough interests they strengthened, the little 
Baby Ions they severally builded by the glory of their 
might, are all melted or melting back into the primeval 
Chaos, as man's merely selfish endeavors are fated to do : 
and here was an action, extending, in virtue of its worldly 35 
influence, we may say, through all time; in virtue of its 
moral nature, beyond all time, being immortal as the 
Spirit of Goodness itself; this action was offered them to 



56 CARLYLE 

do, and light was not given them to do it. Let us pity 
and forgive them. But better than pity, let us go and 
do otherwise. Human suffering did not end with the 
life of Burns; neither was the solemn mandate, "Love 
5 one another, bear one another's burdens," given to the 
rich only, but to all men. True, we shall find no Burns 
to relieve, to assuage by our aid or our pity; but celestial 
natures, groaning under the fardels of a weary life, we 
shall still find; and that wretchedness which Fate has ren- 

10 dered voiceless and tuneless is not the least wretched, but 
the most. 

*£\ Still, we do not think that the blame of Burns's fail- 
ure lies chiefly with the world. The world, it seems to 
us, treated him with more rather than with less kindness 

15 than it usually shows to such men. It has ever, we fear, 
shown but small favor to its Teachers : hunger and naked- 
ness, perils and revilings, the prison, the cross, the poison- 
chalice, have, in most times and countries, been the 
market-price it has offered for Wisdom, the welcome with 

20 which it has greeted those who have come to enlighten 
and purify it. Homer and Socrates, and the Christian 
Apostles, belong to old days; but the world's Martyrology 
was not completed with these. Roger Bacon and Galileo 
languish in priestly dungeons ; Tasso pines in the cell of a 

25 madhouse; Camoens dies begging on the streets of Lis- 
bon. So neglected, so "persecuted they the Prophets," 
not in Judea only, but in all places where men have been. 
We reckon that every poet of Burns's order is, or should 
be, a prophet and teacher to his age; that he has no 

30 right to expect great kindness from it, but rather is bound 
to do it great kindness; that Burns, iiT particular, experi- 
enced fully the usual proportion of the world's goodness; 
and that the blame of his failure, as we have said, lies not 
chiefly with the world. 

35 • Where, then, does it lie? We are forced to answer: 
With himself; it is his inward, not his outward misfor- 
tunes that bring him to the dust. Seldom, indeed, is it 
otherwise; seldom is a life morally wrecked but the grand 



BURNS 57 

cause lies in some internal mal-arrangement, some want 
less of good fortune than of good guidance. Nature fash- 
ions no creature without implanting in it the strength 
needful for its action and duration; least of all does she 
so neglect her masterpiece and darling, the poetic soul. 5 
Neither can we believe that it is in the power of any ex- 
ternal circumstances utterly to ruin the mind of a man; 
nay, if proper wisdom be given him, even so much as to 
affect its essential health and beauty. The sternest sum- w 
total of all worldly misfortunes is Death; nothing more 10 
can lie in the cup of human woe: yet many men, in all 
ages, have triumphed over Death, and led it captive; con- 
verting its physical victory into a moral victory for them- 
selves, into a seal and immortal consecration for all that 
their past life had achieved. What has been done, may 15 
be done again : nay, it is but the degree and not the kind 
of such heroism that differs in different seasons : for with- 
out some portion of this spirit, not of boisterous daring, 
but of silent fearlessness, of self-denial in all its forms, 
no good man, in any scene or time, has ever attained to be 20 
good. 

/(SWe have already stated the error of Burns; and 
mourned over it, rather than blamed it. It was the want 
of unity in his purposes, of consistency in his aims; the 
hapless attempt to mingle in friendly union the common 25 
spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, which is of a 
far different and altogether irreconcilable nature. Burns 
was nothing wholly, and Burns could be nothing, no man 
formed as he was can be anything, by halves. The heart, 
not of a mere hot-blooded, popular Versemonger, or poet- 30 
ical Restaurateur, but of a true Poet and Singer, worthy 
of the old religious heroic times, had been given him: and 
he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, but of scep- 
ticism, selfishness and triviality, when true Nobleness was 
little understood, and its place supplied by a hollow, dis- 35 
social, altogether barren and unfruitful principle of Pride. 
The influences of that age, his open, kind, susceptible 
nature, to say nothing of his highly untoward situation, 



58 CARLYLE 

made it more than usually difficult for him to east aside, 

or rightly subordinate; the better spirit that was within 

him ever sternly demanded its rights, its supremacy: he 

spent his life in endeavoring to reconcile these two ; and 

5 lost it, as he must lose it, without reconciling them. 

#A Burns was born poor; and born also to continue poor, 

for he would not endeavor to be otherwise: this it had 

been well could he have once for all admitted, and con- 

» sidered as finally settled. He was poor, truly; but hun- 

10 dreds even of his own class and order of minds have 
been poorer, yet have suffered nothing deadly from it: 
nay, his own father had a far sorer battle with ungrateful 
destiny than his was; and he did not yield to it, but died 
courageously warring, and to all moral intents prevailing, 

15 against it. True, Burns had little means, had even little 
time for poetry, his only real pursuit and vocation ; but so 
much the more precious was what little he had. In all 
these external respects his case was hard; but very far 
from the hardest. Poverty, incessant drudgery and much 

20 worse evils, it has often been the lot of Poets and wise men 
to strive with, and their glory to conquer. Locke was 
banished as a traitor; and wrote his "Essay on the Human 
Understanding" sheltering himself in a Dutch garret. 
Was Milton rich or at his ease when he composed "Para- 

25 dise Lost"? Not only low, but fallen from a height; not 
only poor, but impoverished; in darkness and with dan- 
gers compassed round, he sang his immortal song, and 
found fit audience, though few. Did not Cervantes finish 
his work, a maimed soldier and in prison? Nay, was not 

30 the "Araucana," which Spain acknowledges as its Epic, 

written without even the aid of paper; on scraps of 

leather, as the stout fighter and voyager snatched any 

moment from that wild warfare? 

>p\And what, then, had these men, which Burns wanted? 

35 Two things; both which, it seems to us, are indis- 
pensable for such men. They had a true, religious prin- 
ciple of morals ; and a single, not a double aim in their 
activity. They were not self-seekers and self -worship- 



BURNS 59 

pers; but seekers and worshippers of something far bet- 
ter than Self. Not personal enjoyment was their object; 
but a high, heroic idea of Religion, of Patriotism, of 
heavenly Wisdom, in one or the other form, ever hovered 
before them ; in which cause they neither shrank from suf - 5 
fering, nor called on the earth to witness it as something 
wonderful; but patiently endured, counting it blessedness 
enough so to spend and be spent. Thus the "golden- 
calf of Self -love," however curiously carved, was not their 
Deity; but the invisible Goodness, which alone is man's 10 
reasonable service. This feeling was as a celestial foun- 
tain, whose streams refreshed into gladness and beauty all 
the provinces of their otherwise too desolate existence. 
In a word, they willed one thing, to which all other 
things were subordinated and made subservient; and 15 
therefore they accomplished it. The wedge will rend 
rocks; but its edge must be sharp and single: if it be 
double, the wedge is bruised in pieces and will rend noth- 
ing. 

k*2Part of this superiority these men owed to their age; in 20 
which heroism and devotedness were still practised, or 
at least not yet disbelieved in: but much of it likewise . 
they owed to themselves. With Burns, again, it was dif- 
ferent. His morality, in most of its practical points, is 
that of a mere worldly man; enjoyment, in a finer or 25 
coarser shape, is the only thing he longs and strives for. 
A noble instinct sometimes raises him above this; but an 
instinct only, and acting only for moments. He has no 
Religion; in the shallow age, where his days were cast, 
Religion was not discriminated from the New and Old 30 
Light forms of Religion; and was, with these, becoming 
obsolete in the minds of men. His heart, indeed, is alive 
with a trembling adoration, but there is no temple in his 
understanding. He lives in darkness and in the shadow 
of doubt. His religion, at best, is an anxious wish; like 35 
that of Rabelais, "a great Perhaps." 

AHe loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart ; could he 
but have loved it purely, and with his whole undivided 



60 CARLTLE 

heart, it had been well. For Poetry, as Burns could have 
followed it, is but another form of Wisdom, of Religion; 
is itself Wisdom and Religion. But this also was denied 
him. His poetry is a stray vagrant gleam, which will not 

5 be extinguished within him, yet rises not to be the true 
light of his path, but is often a wildfire that misleads him. 
It was not necessary for Burns to be rich, to be, or to 
seem, "independent"; but it was necessary for him to be 
at one with his own heart; to place what was highest in 

10 his nature highest also in his life; "to seek within himself 
for that consistency and sequence, which external events 
would forever refuse him." He was born a poet; poetry 
was the celestial element of his being, and should have 
been the soul of his whole endeavors. Lifted into that 

15 serene ether, whither he had wings given him to mount, he 
would have needed no other elevation: poverty, neglect 
and all evil, save the desecration of himself and his Art, 
were a small matter to him ; the pride and the passions of 
the world lay far beneath his feet; and he looked down 

20 alike on noble and slave, on prince and beggar, and all 
that wore the stamp of man, with clear recognition, with 
brotherly affection, with sympathy, with pity. Nay, we 
question whether for his culture as a Poet poverty and 
much suffering for a season were not absolutely advan- 

25 tageous. Great men, in looking back over their lives, 
have testified to that effect. "I would not for much," says 
Jean Paul, "that I had been born richer." And yet Paul's 
birth was poor enough; for, in another place, he adds: 
"The prisoner's allowance is bread and water; and I had 

30 often only the latter." But the gold that is refined in the 
hottest furnace comes out the purest; or, as he has him- 
self expressed it, "the canary-bird sings sweeter the longer 
it has been trained in a darkened cage." 
V\A man like Burns might have divided his hours be- 

35 tween poetry and virtuous industry; industry which all 
true feeling sanctions, nay prescribes, and which has a 
beauty, for that cause, beyond the pomp of thrones : but to 
divide his hours between poetry and rich men's banquets 



BURNS • 61 

was an ill-starred and inauspicious attempt. How could ♦ 
he be at ease at such banquets? What had he to do there, <y *\ 
mingling his music with the coarse roar of altogether >.* 
earthly voices; brightening the thick smoke of intoxica- 
tion with fire lent him from heaven? Was it his aim to 5 
enjoy life? To-morrow he must go drudge as an Excise- 
man ! We wonder not that Burns became moody, indig- 
nant, and at times an offender against certain rules of 
society; but rather that he did not grow utterly frantic, 
and run amuck against them all. How could a man, so 10 
falsely placed, by his own or others' fault, ever know con- 
tentment or peaceable diligence for an hour? What he 
did, under such perverse guidance, and what he forbore 
to do, alike fill us with astonishment at the natural 
strength and worth of his character. 15 

r S Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness ; 
out not in others; only in himself; least of all in simple 
increase of wealth and worldly "respectability." We hope 
we have now heard enough about the efficacy of wealth for 
poetry, and to make poets happy? Nay have we not seen 23 
another instance of it in these very days? Byron, a man 
of an endowment considerably less ethereal than that of 
Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, 
but of an English peer; the highest worldly honors, the 
fairest worldly career, are his by inheritance; the richest 25 
harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another province, by his 
own hand. And what does all this avail him? Is he 
happy, is he good, is he true? Alas, he has a poet's soul, 
and strives towards the Infinite and the Eternal; and soon 
feels that all this is but mounting to the house-top to reach 30 
the stars! Like Burns, he is only a proud man; might, 
like him, have "purchased a pocket-copy of Milton to 
study the character of Satan"; for Satan also is Byron's 
grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry, and the model 
apparently of his conduct. As in Burns's case too, the 35 
celestial element will not mingle with the clay of earth; 
both poet and man of the world he must not be; vulgar 
Ambition will not live kindly with poetic Adoration; he 



62 . CARLYLE 

* cannot serve God and Mammon. Byron, like Burns, is 
not happy; nay, he is the most wretched of all men. His 
life is falsely arranged: the fire that is in him is not a 
strong, still, central fire, warming into beauty the products 
5 of a world; but it is the mad fire of a volcano; and now— 
we look sadly into the ashes of the crater, which ere long 
will fill itself with snow ! 
fet Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries to 
their generation, to teach it a higher Doctrine, a purer 

10 Truth; they had a message to deliver, which left them no 
rest till it was accomplished; in dim throes of pain, this 
divine behest lay smouldering within them; for they knew 
not what it meant, and felt it only in mysterious anticipa- 
tion, and they had to die without articulately uttering it. 

15 They are in the camp of the Unconverted; yet not as high 
messengers of rigorous though benignant truth, but as soft 
flattering singers, and in pleasant fellowship will they live 
there: they are first adulated, then persecuted; they ac- 
complish little for others; they find no peace for them- 

20 selves, but only death and the peace of the grave. We 
confess, it is not without a certain mournful awe that we 
view the fate of these noble souls, so richly gifted, yet 
ruined to so little purpose with all their gifts. It seems to 
us there is a stern moral taught in this piece of history, — 

25 twice told us in our own time! Surely to men of like 
genius, if there be any such, it carries with it a lesson of 
deep impressive significance. Surely it would become 
such a man, furnished for the highest of all enterprises, 
that of being the Poet of his Age, to consider well what it 

30 is that he attempts, and in what spirit he attempts it. For 
the words of Milton are true in all times, and were never 
truer than in this: "He who would write heroic poems 
must make his whole life a heroic poem." If he cannot 
first so make his life, then let him hasten from this arena ; 

35 for neither its lofty glories, nor its fearful perils, are fit 
for him. Let him dwindle into a modish balladmonger ; 
let him worship and besing the idols of the time, and the 
time will not fail to reward him. If, indeed, he can en- 



BURNS 63 

dure to live in that capacity! Byron and Burns could 
not live as idol-priests, but the fire of their own hearts 
consumed them; and better it was for them that they 
could not. For it is not in the favor of the great or of the 
small, but in a life of truth, and in the inexpugnable cita- 5 
del of his own soul, that a Byron's or a Burns's strength 
must lie. Let the great stand aloof from him, or know 
how to reverence him. Beautiful is the union of wealth 
with favor and furtherance for literature; like the cost- 
liest flower- jar enclosing the loveliest amaranth. Yet let 10 
not the relation be mistaken. A true poet is not one 
whom they can hire by money or flattery to be a minister 
of their pleasures, their writer of occasional verses, their 
purveyor of table-wit; he cannot be their menial, he can- 
not even be their partisan. At the peril of both parties, 15 
let no such union be attempted! Will a Courser of the 
Sun work softly in the harness of a Dray-horse? His 
hoofs are of fire, and his path is through the heavens, 
bringing light to all lands; will he lumber on mud high- 
ways, dragging ale for earthly appetites from door to 20 
door? 

k"1But we must stop short in these considerations, which 
would lead us to boundless lengths. We had something 
to say on the public moral character of Burns; but this 
also we must forbear. We are far from regarding him 25 
as guilty before the world, as guiltier than the average; 
nay, from doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten 
thousand. Tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that 
where the Plebiscita of common civic reputations are pro- 
nounced, he has seemed to us even there less worthy of 30 
blame than of pity and wonder. But the world is habitu- 
ally unjust in its judgments of such men; unjust on many 
grounds, of which this one may be stated as the substance : 
It decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes; and not 
positively but negatively, less on what is done right, than 35 
on what is or is not done wrong. Not the few inches of 
deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily 
measured, but the ratio of these to the whole diameter, 



64 CARLYLE 

constitutes the real aberration. This orbit may be a planet's, 
its diameter the breadth of the solar system; or it may 
be a city hippodrome; nay, the circle of a ginhorse, its 
diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of de- 

5 flection only are measured : and it is assumed that the diam- 
eter of the ginhorse, and that of the planet, will yield the 
same ratio when compared with them! Here lies the 
root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, 
Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens to with ap- 

10 proval. Granted, the ship comes into harbor with shrouds 
and tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has 
not been all- wise and all-powerful: but to know how 
blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been 
round the Globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of 

15 Dogs. 

kj^With our readers in general, with men of right feeling 
anywhere, we are not required to plead for Burns. In 
pitying admiration he lies enshrined in all our hearts, in a 
far nobler mausoleum than that one of marble; neither 

20 will his Works, even as they are, pass away from the 
memory of men. While the Shakespeares and Miltons roll 
on like mighty rivers through the country of Thought, 
bearing fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on 
their waves; this little Valclusa Fountain will also arrest 

25 our eye: for this also is of Nature's own and most cun- 
ning workmanship, bursts from the depths of the earth, 
with a full gushing current, into the light of day; and 
often will the traveller turn aside to drink of its clear 
waters, and muse among its rocks and pines ! 






C£* (NOTES 



Text. The text of this edition is based on that of the 
"Peoples" edition and brought into agreement with modern 
methods of printing. 

m 

3, 2— Butler, Samuel (1612-80), author of "Hudibras" 
(1663), a famous satire on the Puritans. The allusion here 
is to Samuel Wesley's epigram; " Poems,' ' 1736, p. 62. 

"While Butler, needy wretch, was yet alive, 
No generous patron would a dinner give ; 
See him, when starved to death and turned to dust, 
Presented with a monumental bust. 
The poet's fate is here in emblem shown, 
He ask'd for bread, and he received a stone.'* 

and also Matt, vn, 9. 

3, 14 — brave mausoleum. * 'Brave' ' is the Scottish 
"braw, " "fine," used ironically. The " mausoleum, ' ' in 
the highest part of Dumfries Churchyard, is a failure. 
Carlyle afterwards rejoiced to hear that it was falling into 
decay, because it was a sham. 

3, 16— other places. Such as New York, Chicago, Albany. 

3, 20 — sixth narrative. See Burns ("Great Writers" 
series). Anderson's bibliography, s.v. Currie, Walker, 
Heron, Irving, Peterkin. The Kev. Hamilton Paul's edition 
(1819) of Burns contains a "life" of the poet, which is 
quoted by Lockhart. 

3, 22— necessary to apologize. "Some apology must be 
deemed necessary for any new attempt to write the 'Life of 
Burns.' "—Lockhart, "Life of Burns," Prefatory Notice. 

4, 1 — no man is a hero. In somewhat its present form, the 
saying is attributed to the Marshal de Catinat and Mde. de 
Cornuel, one of the famous Precieuses. Biichmann traces it 
to Montaigne, "Essays," bk. Ill, cap. 2. 

4, 10 — Sir Thomas Lucy. A wealthy landlord of Charlecote 
Hall, Warwick. According to tradition, Shakespeare stole 
his deer and lampooned him.— John a Combe. Another mag- 

65 



66 NOTES 

nate of Stratford. Shakespeare is supposed to have written 
an epitaph upon him, satirizing his greed. 

4, 19— Excise Commissioners. There were five members of 
the Board. Mr. Eobert Graham of Fintray was Burns 's firm 
friend. 

4, 20— Caledonian Hunt. On the representations of the 
Earl of Glencairn, the Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt 
took one hundred copies of the second (the " Edinburgh ' ', 
1787) edition of Burns 's poems. Altogether 1500 persons 
subscribed for 2800 copies, at a guinea a volume. Burns 
cleared about £500: no poet was ever so paid before. Burns 
dedicated the edition to the Caledonian Hunt. ' ' Ou, aye, the 
Scots are close. ' ' 

4, 21 — Dumfries Aristocracy. ' ' There was a great deal of 
stately Toryism at this time in the town of Dumfries, which 
was the favorite winter retreat of many of the best gentle- 
men's families of the south of Scotland. " — Lockhart, "Life 
of Burns, ' ' p. 211. In spite of his virile democracy, Burns had 
a very genuine respect for individual members of the aris- 
tocracy. See his poems to Lord Daer, the Earl of Glen- 
cairn, etc. 

4, 22— Writers. "Writers to the Signet.' ' "The principal 
class of solicitors in Scotland . . . originally clerks in the 
ofiice of the king's secretary." The term is used loosely in 
Scotland to include attorneys, law agents, etc.— New and Old 
Light. The progressives and the conservatives of the Kirk 
of Scotland. "Ayrshire in particular was the arena in 
which the Old Light and the New were arrayed against each 
other. "—Dow, Introd., lxxi. Burns 's first poems were lam- 
poons on the "Auld Lichts." See letter to Dr. Moore, Aug. 
2, 1787. 

4, 32— Dr. Currie. James Currie, M.D., F.K.S., of Liver- 
pool, acted as editor of the first complete edition of Burns 
after the poet's death. It was published in four volumes in 
1800, for the benefit of Mrs. Burns and her family. Carlyle 's 
criticism is not too severe. 

4, 33— Walker, Josiah W., whose "Poems of Eobert 
Burns," with an account of his life, appeared in 1811. 

5, 30— Constable's Miscellany. Archibald Constable, 
Scott 's personal friend and publisher, the * ' grand Napoleon ' ' 
of the realms of print, the original of Jonathan Oldbuck in 
"The Antiquary." His "Miscellany" was the first attempt 



NOTES 67 

to print books at popular prices. Lockhart 's e t Life of 
Burns' ' is number xxiii of the series. The price was 3s. 6d., 
or 5s. per volume. 

6, 2 —Mr. Morris Birkbeck. Birkbeck 's ' ' Letters from Illi- 
nois, " was reviewed at length in the ''Edinburgh Beview" 
for Jan., 1819. On p. 17, he is quoted as writing to an Eng- 
lish correspondent, ' ' I think you would have nothing to regret 
in exchanging such a circle as I fancy yours to be for any 
society that would surround you in these wild woods. 9J Illi- 
nois was "the backwoods of America, " in 1818. 
s^*6 f 9 — Burns' s Biography. This paragraph is expanded 
into an entire essay, " Biography ' ' (1832), as preliminary to 

review of Croker's "Boswell. " 

6, 13 — Our notions upon, etc. Boynton suggests that this 
and similar apologetic phrases are remnants of Jeffrey's 
' * editing. ' ' 

7, 1 — Burns ... a prodigy. In reviewing Cromek 's l ' Kel- 
iques of Eobert Burns," in the "Edinburgh Review" (Jan., 
1809), Jeffrey opens with this sentence: "Burns is by far 
the greatest of our poetical prodigies — from Stephen Duck to 
Thomas Dermody. " 

7, 6 — now nothing can be done. Mr. Andrew Lang says 
well: "This country has been much scorned for her treat- 
ment of Burns. How was she to treat him? He deserved 
what Socrates says he merited, 'to be kept at the public ex- 
pense at the town-hall. ' But he would not have accepted the 
offer had Scotland possessed a Prytaneum, and had Scotland 
made the offer. ' ' 

7, 24— without model. This statement needs modification. 
Burns had the respect for education that runs in Scottish 
blood. In spite of his poverty, he was early made familiar 
with some of the best English literature; and he had, at his 
death, a well selected little library. He learned not a little 
from Eamsay, Fergusson, and the old popular poetry. 

8, 1 — age the most prosaic. Elsewhere Carlyle says of it: 
"Soul extinct, stomach well alive. " 

8, 6 — poor man's hut. "Love had he found in huts 
where poor men lie. ' , — Wordsworth, "Song at the Feast of 
Brougham Castle." 

8, 7— Fergus[s]on, Eobert (1750-74), the son of an Edin- 
burgh clerk, educated at the University of St. Andrews, became 
a lawyer's clerk, took to drink, and died in a public asylum. 



68 NOTES 

Burns put up a tombstone over his grave. The inscription on 
the tombstone gives the date of Fergusson's birth and death, 
and a poor adaptation of a quatrain from Gray's "Elegy"; 
on the reverse are these lines : ' ' By special grant of the man- 
agers to Eobert Burns, who erected this stone, this burial-place 
is to remain for ever sacred to the memory of Eobert Fer- 
guson."— Ramsay, Allan (1686-1758), wig-maker in Edin- 
burgh, a "canny Scot," became a book-seller and made 
money, published "The Tea-Table Miscellany," in 1724-27, 
a collection of English and Scottish songs, and in 1725, a 
pastoral drama, "The Gentle Shepherd/ ' his best work. See 
Burns, "Epistle to John Lapraik." 

9, 1— advised to write a tragedy. As the supreme achieve- 
ment of genius. 

9, 6 — Sir Hudson Lowe. The British officer commanding 
at St. Helena during Napoleon's captivity. See Kosebery, 
"Napoleon, the Last Phase," for adverse judgment on him; 
but opinions differ. The St. Helena memoirs were just ap- 
pearing and being discussed.— "amid the melancholy main." 

"As when a shepherd of the Hebrid-Isles, 
Placed far amid the melancholy main." 

—Thomson, " Castle of Indolence, " canto I, stanza xxx. 

9, 8 — "spectacle of pity and fear." From Aristotle's 
famous definition of " tragedy.' ' 

9, 20 — "eternal melodies.' ■ In a letter to Emerson, dated 
Feb. 13, 1837, Carlyle writes: "I rejoice much in the 
glad serenity of soul with which you look out on this 
wondrous Dwelling-place of yours and mine,— with an ear 
for the Ewigen Melodien, which pipe in the winds round us, 
and utter themselves in all sounds and sights and things. ' ' 

9, 38 — How his heart flows out. "I have some favourite 
flowers in spring; among which are the mountain- daisy, the 
hare-bell, the fox-glove, the wild brier-rose, the budding birch, 
and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with 
particular delight."— Cromek, II, 197. 

10, 3— "Daisy." "To a Mountain Daisy On Turning One 
Down With the Plough, in April, 1786. ' ' See previous note. 

10, 4 — "wee cowering." Not quoted correctly. "Wee, 

sleekit, cow , rin , ) tim'rous beastie, " first line of "To a 

Mouse, On Turning Her up in Her Nest With the Plough, 
November 1785." 



NOTES 69 



10, 6—° thole the sleety/ ' 



Hast cost thee mony a weary nibble ! 

Now thou 's turned out, for a' thy trouble, 

But house or hald, 
To thole the winter's sleety dribble, 

An' cranreuch cauld." 

10, 7— "hoar visage." 

"I saw grim Nature's visage hoar 
Struck thy young eye." — "The Vision," Duan Second. 

Carlyle does not quote accurately. See Cromek 's ' ' Beliques, ' ' 
II, 11. 

10, 11— "it raises his thoughts.' ' " There is scarcely any 
earthly subject gives me more— I do not know if I should 
call it pleasure— but something which exalts me, something 
which enraptures me — than to walk in the sheltered side of 
a wood, or high plantation, in a cloudy winter-day, and hear 
the stormy wind howling above the trees, and raving over 
the plain! It is my best season for devotion; my mind is 
wrapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to Him, who, in the 
pompous language of the Hebrew bard, "walks on the wings 
of the wind. " (See "Psalms," civ. 3.) This is quoted with 
approval by Jeffrey. Edin. Eev., Jan., 1809. 

"Ev'n winter bleak has charms for me 
When winds rave thro' the naked tree, 
Or frost on hills of Ochiltree 

Are hoary grey; 
Or blinding drifts wild-furious flee 

Dark'ning the day."— "To W. S— n." 

11, 12— "quick to learn." In "A Bard's Epitaph,' ' 
Burns thus describes himself: 

"The poor inhabitant below 
Was quick to learn and wise to know." 

11, 17 — like an .ffiolian harp. "Are we a piece of ma- 
chinery, which, like the Eolian harp, passive, takes the im- 
pression of passing accident?"— Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, 
Jan. 1, 1789. 

12, 1 — To try by the strict rules. "It is not 'unfair' 
—pace Carlyle— to 'test him by the rules of art.' It is 
true he 'never once was permitted to grapple with any subject 
with the full collection of his strength.' True, he never 
exercised his powers on the large scale of Sophocles or of 
Shakspere. But even in his most trivial work he showed the 




70 NOTES 

same artistic instinct for unity of conception, singleness of 
impression, beauty and coherence of detail. ' , — Dow, ' ' Burns, ' ' 
A. P. S., lxxix. 

12, 23— Sincerity. In " Heroes and Hero-Worship, ' ' 
Carlyle makes this the distinguishing characteristic of all 
great men. 

12, 37 — "in homely rustic jingle.' ■ In the "Epistle to 
Davie, A Brother Poet, ' ' Burns writes : 

"I set me down to pass the time 
And spin a verse or twa o' rhyme, 
In namely westlan' jingle." 

Carlyle quotes from memory. 

13, 3 — Horace's rule. 

"Si vis me flere, dolendum est 
Primum ipsi tibi." — Ars Poetica, 102 f. 

"If thou wouldst have me weep, thou must first thyself 
have known sorrow." 

13, 34 — Byron. It was part of Carlyle 's mission to dis- 
courage Byronism, the great literary influence when this essay 
was written. 

14, 19 — a sincere work. Critics are by no means agreed 
now as to Byron's merits. Arnold praised him highly; 
Swinburne and Andrew Lang decry him. 

15, 12 — Letters. Andrew Lang thinks the letters to 
"Clarinda" (Mrs. McLehose) should have been burnt. 

15, 22 — Burns's social rank. It was Carlyle 's own. In 
America, with democracy triumphant, it is hard for us even 
to understand l i his birth 's invidious bar. ' ' 

15, 31 — Mrs. Dunlop. Frances Wallace Dunlop, a culti- 
vated Scottish gentlewoman, twenty-eight years older than 
Burns, one of his truest and most helpful friends. She was 
the only daughter of Sir Thomas Wallace, of Craigie, Ayr- 
shire, of the same kin as the famous Scottish patriot. At 
seventeen, she married John Dunlop, of Dunlop, Ayrshire. 
Though wealthy, she spent her life in retirement at her coun- 
try seat. Dr. Currie tried in vain to persuade her into -allow- 
ing her letters to Burns to be published along with the poet 's. 
"She concluded her interview by half jestingly purchasing 
back her letters from him one by one, laying a letter of 
Burns for each of her own, till she obtained the whole." 
(Chambers.) 



NOTES 71 

16, 5— conventional heroic world. Cf. Mrs. Browning, 
i * Aurora Leigh, ' ' bk. v : 

"Nay, if there 's room for poets in this world . . • 
Their sole work is to represent the age, 
Their age, not Charlemagne's, — this live throbbing age, 
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, 
And spends more passion, more heroic heat, 
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, 
Than Roland with his knights at Roncevalles." 

16, 7 — rose-colored Novels. "P^ham," Bulwer's 
" dandy' ' novel, was published in 1827, and was much 
ridiculed by Carlyle and other writers in "Fraser's Mag- 
azine. ' ' 

16, 10— Virgins of the Sun. Unidentified. — Knights of 
the Cross. "The Knights of the Cross; or the Hermit's 
Prophecy. A Musical Komance, " was published in 1826. 

16, 11 — malicious Saracens. This may refer to such tales 
as "Emir Malek, Prince of the Assassins, M a three- volume 
novel published in 1828, or to "The Kuzzilbash, a tale of 
Khorasan. ' ' 

16, 12 — Chiefs in wampum. James Fenimore Cooper 
began the publication of his " Leather-stocking ' y tales in 
1821. 

16, 15 — great moralist. Possibly Coleridge. 

17, 6 — hopes that wander. From Milton, "Paradise 

Lost," II, 146-148. 

"Sad cure! for who would lose 
Though full of pain this intellectual being, 
These thoughts that wander through eternity." 

17, 13 — Laughter must. From Milton, ' ( L 'Allegro. 9 f 

"Sport that wrinkled Care derides 
And Laughter holding both his sides." 

17, 18 — vates. "Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our 
loose modern notions of them. In some old languages, again, 
the titles are synonymous; Vates means both Prophet and 
Poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well under- 
stood, have much kindred of meaning. ' , — ' l Heroes and Hero- 
Worship, ' ' in. 

17, 20 — Delphi. A city in Phocis (now Kastri), famous 
for the oracle of Apollo. 

17, 25— Minerva Press. A London publishing house, ridi- 
culed by Lamb and Carlyle. See Carlyle, " Essays,' ' I, 13. 



72 NOTES 

17, 32 — "the elder dramatists." A reference to Jeffrey's 
complacent sentence in his review of Keats ("Edinburgh 
Review, ' ' August, 1820) . ' ' That imitation of our old writers, 
and especially of our older dramatists, to which we cannot 
help flattering ourselves that we have somewhat contributed, 
has brought on, as it were, a second spring in our poetry. " 
P. 203. 

18, 2 — "travels from Dan." From Sterne's "Sentimental 
Journey," I, 613, where Sterne hits at " Smelf ungus, " i.e., 
Smollett, for his jaundice-tinged "Travels through France 
and Italy." 

18, 11— Borgia. Caesar Borgia (1476-1503), Italian gen- 
eral and statesman, famous for his ambition and his crimes, 
whom Machiavelli had in mind when he wrote s ' II Principe. ' ' 
—Luther (1483-1546), the founder of Protestantism in Ger- 
many, was nevertheless a contemporary of Borgia. 

18, 14 — Mossgiel and Tarbolton. Mossgiel was the name 
of the farm near Mauchline that Burns and his brother rented 
from 1784 to 1786. The Burns family lived on a farm at 
Lochlea, Tarbolton, from 1777 till 1784, when William 
Burns the father died. In 1780, Burns assisted in founding 
the < ' Bachelors ' Club ' ' at Tarbolton. 

18, 16 — Crockford's. A magnificent club built by William 
Crockford, a fish-monger, in 1827, in St. James's St., London. 
It became the rage. "All the celebrities in England from 
the Duke of Wellington to the youngest ensign in the Guards, 
hastened to enrol themselves as members." It soon became 
notorious for gambling. 

18, 21 — Such cobweb speculations. Carlyle here agrees 
with Matthew Arnold, when he asserts that "the future of 
poetry is immense. ' ' 

18, 34— Wounded Hare. Full title, ' ' On Seeing A Wounded 
Hare Limp By Me Which A Fellow Had Just Shot At." 
This sympathy with the ' ' inferior creation " is a mark of the 
new school of poetry. Burns would have agreed with Cowper 
in condemning the man who needlessly set foot upon a worm. 
Mrs. Oliphant writes: "He is like a god in his tender 
though tfuln ess, in his yearning for the welfare of all." — 
"Literary History," Vol. I, p. 118. 

18, 37 — Halloween. The Scots, though they went furthest 
in the revolt from Eome, retained a most distinctively 
Komish observance, the vigil of AH Saints, November 1st. 



NOTES 73 

The poem deals with the ' ' fortune-telling ' ' ceremonies among 
the Scottish peasantry. 

19, 1 — Theocritus. The Greek poet of Sicily, who wrote 
idyls (eldvTCkia), "little pictures of life. " 

19, 2 — Holy Fair. One of Burns 's most drastic satires 
on the Old Lights. (See 41, 11, note). "Holy Fair is a 
common phrase in the west of Scotland for a sacramental 
occasion.' ' Cur rie.— Council of Trent. The famous Coun- 
cil of the Church of Eome, which met at Trent in the Tyrol 
in 1545 to 1563. The differences between the Lutherans and 
Catholics were considered, and various Catholic doctrines de- 
fined. 

19, 3— Jubilee. " 'A year of remission' " from the penal 
consequences of sin. . . . An ordinary jubilee occurs at Eome 
every twenty-fifth year, lasts from Christmas to Christmas, 
and is extended in the following year to the rest of the 
church. ' ' " Catholic Dictionary. » ' The first Jubilee, of 1300, 
was attended by striking ceremonies, and is supposed to 
have given Dante inspiration.— Superstition, Hypocrisy and 
Fun. Three characters in ' ( The Holy Fair. ' ' 

19, 25 — "lightly moved.' ' The quotation is unidentified. 

20, 5 — Retzsch. Frederick August Moritz Ketzsch (1779- 
1857), professor in the Academy of Art, at Dresden, famous 
for his miniatures and outline illustrations of Schiller, 
Goethe, and Shakespere. 

20, 32— "Auld Brig." In Burns 's poem of "The Brigs 
of Ayr." The quotation is from the words of the Old 
Bridge to the New. 

20, 35— "Coil." Coyl Water, a tributary of the Ayr enter- 
ing from the south bank near the mouth. The whole district 
was named from a Pictish king, Coilus. Cf. "The Twa 
Dogs," 1. 2. 

20, 36— "Lugar." One of the larger tributaries of the 
river Ayr. 

21, 1 — "Greenock." Greenock Water, a small stream 
flowing into the Ayr near its source. 

21, 2— "haunted Garpal." A small tributary of the Ayr 
near its source. Burns has a note—' ' ghaists still inhabit there. ' ' 

21, 3— "spotting thowes." Thaws that make watery 
spots in the snow. 

21, 4— "snaw-broo rowes." Eolls his snow-brew (i.e., 
mixture of snow and water). 



74 NOTES 

21, 5 — "speak" Or spate — a freshet. Cf. Tennyson, 
"Gareth and Lynette," 11. 1-3. 

21, 6— "gate." Way. 

21, 7— Glenbuck,etc. "From source to mouth."— Dow. The 
source is marked ' i Glenbuck Iron-Works ' ' on the Keith John- 
stone map.— "Rottenkey." Dow spells it " Eatton-key " ; 
key — quay. Eatton is Scotch for rat;— the quay of the rats. 
1 * A small landing-place above the large key. J ' Burns 's note. 

21, 9 — "down ye '11 hurl." This prophecy is uttered by 
the "Auld Brig" (built probably at the end of the fifteenth 
century) to the "New Brig," built in 1788, through the ex- 
ertions of Provost Ballantyne, Burns 's personal friend. The 
new bridge situated 100 yards further down the stream did 
give way in 1877; and another one has taken its place.— 
"Deil nor," etc. Deil, devil— an emphatic parenthesis. 

21, 10 — gumlie jaups. Muddy splashes. Dow derives gum- 
lie from gummle, to stir up; the same as jumble; Dow, 
gumpe, to jolt. Jaup is found also jalp. 

21, 11 — Poussin-picture. Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665), 
"the first delineator of heroic landscape." But his 
"Deluge" is not highly esteemed. See Euskin's "Modern 
Painters," v, ix, §18. 

21, 15 — "Farmer's" commendation. Full title, "The 
Auld Farmer's New Year Morning Salutation to his Auld 
Mare, Maggie." 

21, 17 — Homer's Smithy, etc. The smithy described in 
the Iliad, bk. xvni; the chariot of Priam, King of Troy, 
in the Iliad, bk. xxiv. 

21, 19 — "Burn-the-wind." Or Burnewin, name for the 
blacksmith. See i i Scotch Drink. ' ' 

21, 25— "The pale Moon." From "Open the Door to Me, 
Oh ! " See Burns 's correspondence with Thomson, xv. 

21, 36— Fabulosus Hydaspes. "Hydaspes, river of ro- 
mance! "—Horace, "Odes," I, xxii, 8. It is a tributary of 
the Indus. 

22, 16 — * 'a gentleman that derived." In his life of Burns, 
Allan Cunningham writes: "None of them (the nobility and 
gentry) were prepared to accept the brotherhood of one who 
held the patent of his honours immediately from nature." 
P. 75a. 

22, 19— "red-wat-shod." Shod with red- wet, i.e., blood. 
See "To W. Simson"— 



NOTES 75 

"Oft have our fearless fathers strode 

By Wallace' side, 
Still pressing onward, red-wat-shod, 
Or glorious died." 

"The story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice into 
my veins, which will boil along there, till the flood-gates of 
life shut in eternal rest. " — Burns, Letter to Dr. Moore. 

22, 26 — "All the faculties.' ' From a letter of Professor 
Dugald Stewart to Dr. James Currie, one of the first editors 
of Burns. (See note, 23, 34.) 

22, 35 — Keats. Here Carlyle 's limited artistic sympathy 
' { damns with faint praise. ' ' 

23, 10— shown an Understanding. Cf . " It is truly a lordly 
spectacle how this great soul takes in all kinds of men and 
objects, a Falstaff, an Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets 
them all forth to us in their round completeness; loving, just, 
the equal brother of all. 'Novum Organum, ' and all the in- 
tellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order; 
earthy material, poor in comparison. ' ' — ' ' Heroes, " in. 

23, 29 — "the highest" . . . "cannot be expressed." 
Probably quoted from Carlyle himself. 

23, 34 — passage above quoted. Carlyle forgets that the 
reader has not Dugald Stewart's entire letter. (See note, 
22, 26.) In the passage referred to Stewart says: "A present 
which Mr. Alison sent him afterwards of his "Essay on 
Taste," drew from Burns a letter of acknowledgment, which 
I remember to have read with some degree of surprise at the 
distinct conception he appeared from it to have formed, of 
the several principles of the doctrine of association." Stew- 
art was professor of metaphysics, hence his "surprise" (not 
"wonder"); Alison's book discusses the effect of "associa- 
tion." Lockhart writes: "It is difficult ... to read without 
a smile that letter of Mr. Dugald Stewart, in which he de- 
scribes himself and Mr. Alison as being surprised to discover 
that Burns, after reading the latter author's elegant 'Essay 
on Taste,' had really been able to form some shrewd enough 
notion of the general principles of the association of ideas. ' ' — 
"Life of Burns," p. 121. 

24, 1 — "We know nothing." From the letter of Burns to 
Mrs. Dunlop, dated "Ellisland, New- Year day morning, 
1789." Quoted also by Jeffrey, in reviewing Cromek's 
"Reliques of Robert Burns." "Edinburgh Review," Janu- 
ary, 1809. 



76 NOTES 

24, 38— " Love furthers knowledge." Unidentified. 

25, 7 — " hoary hawthorn.' ■ All three quotations from 
Burns 's letter on p. 68, note to 9, 38. 

25, 13— "ourie cattle." From "A Winter Night/ ' on the 
pathetic theme in ' ' King Lear, ' ' in, iv, 28 f . 

"Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, 
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm I" 

25, 33 — "But fare you weel." Last verse of "Address to 
the Deil." 

26, 1 — "He is the father of curses." From the famous 
passage in "Tristram Shandy," in, ii, in which Dr. Slop re- 
counts the curse of St. Ernulphus, on which kind-hearted 
Uncle Toby (Captain Shandy) comments. This was a fa- 
vorite book of both Carlyle and Burns. 

26, 8 — Indignation makes verses. Facit indignatio versum. 
—Juvenal, "Satires," I, 79. 

26, 16 — Johnson . . . loved a good hater. "Dear Bathurst 
was a man to my very heart 's content : he hated a fool, and 
he hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig; he was a very good 
hater." Piozzi's "Anecdotes," 83. 

26, 30— Furies of ^Eschylus. Eeferring to the Eumenides. 
"The Furies," of iEschylus (525-456 B.C.). 

26, 34 — "Dweller in yon Dungeon." This poem was 
written because Burns was turned out of an inn on a stormy 
night by "the funeral pageantry of the late Mrs. Oswald." 
Carlyle over-rates it. 

27, 5 — dithyrambic composed on horseback. "In writing 
to Thomson, September 1, 1793, Burns mentions a tradition 
that the air 'Hey tuttie, taitie, ' was Bruce 's March at 
Bannockburn. 'This thought in my yesternight's evening 
walk warmed me to a pitch of enthusiasm . . . which I 
threw into a kind of Scotch ode that one might suppose to 
be the royal Scots' Address on that eventful morning. ' 
The sensational story of its composition which Carlyle 
is mainly responsible for propagating, — 'dithyrambic on 
horseback,' 'wildest Galloway moor,' 'throat of the whirl- 
wind,' etc., etc.,— finds no support in Burns 's own account, 
and it is contradicted by what he repeatedly says about his 
methods of composition. "—Dow. 

27, 7 — Mr. Syme. "Mr. Syme, of Byedale . . . after the 
death of Burns, promoted with the utmost zeal a subscrip- 



NOTES 77 

tion for the support of the widow and children . . . ; and 
in conjunction with other friends of this virtuous and desti- 
tute family, he projected the publication of these volumes 
for their benefit. "—Currie, " Dedication, ' ' vi, eighth ed., 
1820. Syme also induced Dr. Currie to act as editor, and 
made a journey with Gilbert Burns to Liverpool, to explain, 
arrange, and select the manuscripts. 

27, 18 — "Macpherson's Farewell." Macpherson was a 
Highland freebooter, executed at Banff, Nov. 16, 1700. He 
composed a "farewell," which Burns varied and added to. 
The Carlyles sang it once for Tennyson, when he stayed 
late at Cheyne Bow. 

27, 21 — Cacus. A robber, three-headed and vomiting 
flame. See Ovid, Fasti, i, v, 551.— "lived a life." From 
' i Macpherson 's Farewell. ' * 

"I 've lived a life of sturt and strife, 
I die by treacherie." 

27, 31— at Thebes. Cf . Milton 's " II Penseroso, > >— 

"Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy 
In scepter' d pall come sweeping by, 
Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line." 

28, 34 — not so much a poem. Opinions differ regarding 
this poem: Burns thought it his best. 

29, 9 — not the Tieck. Carlyle translated three tales by 
Musaus, and four by Tieck, in his "German Komance, " 
4 vols., 1827. In his preface, he criticizes Musaus as here 
he criticizes Burns: "These ruins of the remote time he has 
not attempted to complete into a perfect edifice. ' ' To Tieck 
he gives higher praise. 

29, 29 — the most strictly poetical. Scott praised it also. 

29, 30— does not appear. "Unfortunately the correctness 
of his taste did not always correspond with the strength of 
his genius, and hence some of the most exquisite of his 
comic productions are rendered unfit for the light."— Currie, 
"Prefatory Kemarks, " I, 10. In a foot-note, he mentions 
i { Holy Willie 's Prayer, ' ' and three others. 

30, 1 — "raucle carlin." Sturdy crone. One of the "Jolly 
Beggars. 9 ' She sings ' ' A Highland lad my love was born. ' ' 
—"wee Apollo." The fiddler, "A pigmy scraper, wi' his 
fiddle. ' '— ' < The Jolly Beggars. ' > 



78 NOTES 

30, 2— "Son of Mars." The old soldier, whose song begins, 

"I am a son of Mars who have been in many wars 
And show my cuts and scars wherever I come." 

30, 3 — "Poosie-Nansie." The nickname for Mrs. Gibson, 
who kept the ale-house in Mauchline, the scene of the 
" Jolly Beggars' ' cantata. 

30, 6— blanket of the Night. Cf. " Macbeth,' > i, v, 54— 
"the blanket of the dark." 

30, 12 — "Caird." A gypsy, a tinker— one of the "Jolly 
Beggars. ' '— ' ' Balladmonger. ' ' The wandering bard ' * a wight 
of Homer's craft"— another of the "Jolly Beggars." 

30,, 13 — "brats and callets." Children and wenches, 
quoted from the "Jolly Beggars." 

30, 20 — Teniers. David Teniers. Of the two painters of 
this name, father and son, the younger (1610-1690) is the 
more famous. Of the Dutch School, they are famous for 
their faithful delineation of the life of Flemish boors and 
villagers. 

30, 25— "Beggars' Opera." A play written by John 
Gay in 1727, in ridicule of the Italian opera, then fashion- 
able. The hero was Captain Macheath, a highwayman. It 
was immensely popular.— "Beggars' Bush." A comedy by 
John Fletcher (1647). In it the beggars sing and revel; 
see ii, i. 

30, 26 — other critics. "The concluding ditty ... is cer- 
tainly far superior to anything in the 'Beggars' Opera,' 
where alone we could hope to find its parallel." — Scott, in 
Cunningham, I, 331. Carlyle follows Lockhart's lead here. 
" l Beggars' Bush,' and ' Beggars' Opera,' sink into tame- 
ness in the comparison." — "Life of Burns," 308. 

31, 8 — "persons of quality." A common description of 
the authors of songs, books, etc., in the eighteenth century. 

31, 9— tawdry, hollow, wine-bred. Cf. "A work not to 
be raised from the heat of youth or the vapours of wine; 
like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar 
amourist, or the trencher fury of some rhyming parasite."— 
Milton, "The Eeason of Church Government," II, 481 
(Bohn). 

31, 10 — "flowing and watery." "Then grew the flowing 
and watery vein of Osorius, the Portugal bishop, to be in 
price. "—Bacon, "Advancement of Learning," I, iv, 2. 



NOTES 79 

Osorius, Bishop of Sylves in Algarve, died 1580; wrote Be 
Bebus Gestis Emanuelis, 1574. On his redundant style, see 
Ascham, "The Scholemaster, ' ' 110, 129-131, ed. Mayor 
(Wright). 
31, 17 — Limbo. Border region between heaven and hell. 

31, 23 — Songs are honest. Burns composed his songs to 
Scottish airs already popular, altering and improving songs 
already in existence. Their basis was popular music. See 
Dow, Introduction, iv. 

32, 8 — * 'sweet as the smile." From "Jessie"— 

"Here 's a health to ane I lo'e dear! 
Here 's a health to ane I lo'e dear! 
Thou art sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, 
And soft as their parting tear — Jessie." 

See the Burns-Thomson correspondence, lxxxvii. 

32, 22 — Fletcher's aphorism. Andrew Fletcher of Sal- 
toun (1653-1726), Scottish traveller, soldier, statesman and 
writer. His often-quoted aphorism runs, in its original 
form, U I said I knew a very wise man so much of Sir 
Christopher's [Musgrave] sentiment, that he believed if a 
man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care 
who should make the laws of a nation. " 

33, 12 — Grays and Glovers. Poets such as Thomas Gray 
(1716-1771) of the "Elegy" and Eichard Glover (1712- 
1785) of "Boadicea"— "minor poets' ' in Traill's phrase. 

33, 13 — in vacuo. Lat., in empty space. 

33, 18— "Rambler.' • From 1750 to 1752, Johnson con- 
ducted a weekly journal called the ' i Eambler, ' ' on the plan 
of Addison's "Spectator," a news sheet with an essay, 
which was published in 1711-12, 1714. 

33, 19 — "Rasselas." "Easselas, the Prince of Abys- 
sinia," a story written by Johnson in a week, in 1759, to 
defray the expenses of his mother's funeral. The scene is 
laid in the East; but "local color" is absent. 

33, 28— Boston. Thomas (not John) (1677-1732). His 
"Fourfold State," 1720, deals with human nature before 
the Fall, its entire depravity, recovery begun on earth, and 
happiness or misery hereafter. It was the recognized hand- 
book of Calvinistic theology, and a favorite book among 
the Scottish peasantry. 

33, 30 — schisms in Church. The first— the Associate Pres- 



80 NOTES 

bytery — was in 1740; the second — the ' ' Belief " schism — in 
1752. 

33, 31 —schisms in Body Politic. The second Jacobite re- 
bellion of 1745. 

33, 35 — Lord Karnes. Henry Home, Lord Karnes (1696- 
1782). His " Elements of Criticism" appeared in 1762. 

33, 36— Hume. David Hume (1711-1776), philosopher and 
historian. "His thorough-going empiricism formed a land- 
mark in the development of metaphysics. ' ' — Robertson. 
William Kobertson (1721-1793), the historian, author of the 
"History of Charles V" and the "History of America.' ' 

33, 37— Smith. Adam Smith (1723-1790), political econo- 
mist, professor at Glasgow University, author of ' i The Wealth 
of Nations," which established political economy as a sepa- 
rate science. 

34, 1 — ■ 'fervid genius." Perfervidum ingenium Scoto- 
rum, founded on Buchanan's phrase il Scotorum prcefervida 
ingenia (Berum Scotic. Hist, xvi, li).— -The "Oxford Dic- 
tionary. ' ' 

34, 8— Racine. "Exact Eacine" (1639-1699), the great- 
est tragic dramatist of France, author of Phedre, Athalie, etc. 
—Voltaire. Name assumed by Francois Marie Arouet (1694- 
1778), the famous French wit and sceptic. Carlyle wrote a 
long essay upon him in 1829.— Batteux. Charles Batteux 
(1713-1780), writer on philosophy and the principles of 
literature. 

34, 10 — Montesquieu. Charles de Secondat, Baron de la 
Brede et de Montesquieu (1689-1755), a famous French 
writer; author of L 'Esprit des Lois. — Mably. Gabriel Bon- 
nat de Mably (1709-1785), French critic of Hume, Kobert- 
son, Gibbon, and Voltaire. 

34, 11— Quesnay. Francois Quesnay (1694-1774), emi- 
nent French physician and political economist; contributor 
to the Encyclopedic 

34, 16— La Fleche. A small town in Anjou, where Hume 
composed his "Treatise of Human Nature," 1735-36. Here 
was the Jesuits ' college in which Descartes was educated. 

34, 29 — stern Motherland. A suggestion from Scott's line 
in the ' ' Lay ' ' — ' ' O Caledonia stern and wild. ' ' 

34, 36 — Our Scottish sages. Carlyle ridicules this mental 
attitude in * ' Sartor Eesartus, ' ' I, i. 

35, 1 — M Doctrine of Rent." A part of every treatise on 
political economy. 



NOTES #-y ' «|ltt 

35, 2 — " Natural History of Religion.' ■ Hume published 
this work in his "Four Dissertations, ' ' 1757. 

35, 8 — Propaganda. ' i The sacred congregation of Cardinals 
de propaganda fide . . . was practically established by Greg- 
ory XV (1662) to guard, direct and promote the foreign mis- 
sions. Urban VIII (1623-1644) instituted the l College of 
the Propaganda ' as part of the same design, where young 
men of every nation and language might be trained for the 
priesthood. ' ' — " Catholic Dictionary. ' ' 

35, 19 — "Scottish prejudice." See ante, Letter to Dr. 
Moore. 

35, 28— happy- valley. See note, 33, 19. An allusion to 
the valley, surrounded by mountains, in which Kasselas, the 
prince of Abyssinia, lived with all imaginable pleasures. 

35, 33 — "A wish," etc. Part of the second stanza of "An- 
swer to Verses Addressed to the Poet by the Guid-wife of 
Wauchope-House. ' ' 

36, 2 — bearded bear. Bearded barley. 

37, 16 — For the world still appears, etc. Carlyle >s philoso- 
phy of life in one sentence. 

38, 5— "pr established harmony." "The designation of 
Leibnitz for his theory of the Divinely-established relation 
between body and mind— the movements of monads and the 
succession of ideas, as it were a constant agreement between 
two clocks." — Fleming, "Vocabulary of Philosophy." 

38, 17 — journey to Edinburgh. On the success of the 
Kilmarnock edition of his poems, Burns was induced to go 
to Edinburgh by a letter of Dr. Blacklock's to his friend, Dr. 
Laurie, suggesting the issue of a second edition. He re- 
mained in the city from November, 1786, until May 6, 1787. 

38, 35 — crossing of a brook. On orders to resign his com- 
mand, Caesar in 49 B.C. crossed the little river Eubicon and 
invaded Italy. This brought about the downfall of the 
Kepublic and the establishment of the Empire. 

39, 2 — rustic wonder. Cf. ante, note, 7, 1. 

39, 14 — Let us worship God. "Eobert had frequently re- 
marked to me that he thought there was something peculiarly 
venerable in the phrase 'Let us worship God,' used by a 
decent, sober head of a family, introducing family worship. 
To this sentiment of the author the world is indebted for 
'Cotter's Saturday Night.' "—Letter of Gilbert Burns to 
Dr. Currie, Ap. 2, 1798. Burns conducted family worship in 
his own home. 



II 



J 82 NOTES 

39, 15— "priest-like father/ ' From the " Cotter's Satur- 
day Night, ' ' xiv, — 

"The priest-like father reads the sacred page." 

— threatenings of unjust men. « ' My indignation yet boils at 
the recollection of the scoundrel factor's insolent threaten- 
ing letters, which used to set us all in tears. ' '—Burns to 
Dr. Moore, August 2, 1787. 

39, 19— "little band of brethren.' ' Suggested by Shake- 
speare, "Henry V," iv, iii,— "We few, we happy few, we 
band of brothers." 

39, 28— bates no jot. From Milton, Sonnet xxn— 

"Yet I argue not 
Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot 
Of heart or hope." 

39, 35— "in glory and in joy." Wordsworth, reference to 
Burns in ' i Eesolution and Independence, ' ' vn, 45 f . The 
present reading of the line is, — 

"Following the plough, along the mountain side.' 

40, 1 — gayest, brightest, etc. This statement needs modifi- 
cation. Murdoch says: "Eobert's countenance was generally 
grave, and expressive of a serious, contemplative and thought- 
ful mind." 

40, 8— kind of mud-bath. Carlyle's Puritan teaching on 
the subject of wild oats. Cf . Tennyson, ' i In Memoriam, ' ' liii. 

41, 1— adamant of Fate. Allusion to the wreck of Sinbad 
the Sailor in the ' ' Arabian Nights. ' ' 

41, 11— New-Light Priesthood. "The Old-Light enthusi- 
asts aspired to be ranked with the purest of the Covenanters ; 
they patronized austerity of manners and humility of dress, 
and stigmatized much that the world loved, as things vain 
and unessential to salvation. The New-Light countenanced 
no such self-denial; men were permitted to gallop on Sunday; 
and women were indulged in the article of dress, and failings 
or follies were treated with mercy at least, if not indul- 
gence. . . . The Poet naturally fell into the ranks of those 
who allowed greater liberty of speech, and a wider longitude 
of morals. ' '—Allan Cunningham, I, 38 f. 

41, 24 — "passions raging." "My passions, when once 
lighted up, raged like so many devils, till they got vent in 
poetry." — Burns, Letter to Dr. Moore. 



NOTES 83 

41, 36 — refuge of lies. "The hail shall sweep away the 
refuge of lies. "—Isaiah, xxvm, 17. 

42, 2 — "hungry Ruin has him." "As soon as I was 
master of nine guineas, the price of wafting me to the 
torrid zone, I took a steerage-passage in the first ship that 
was to sail from the Clyde; for 

^ 'Hungry ruin had me in the wind.' 

I had been for some days skulking from covert to covert, 
under all the terrors of a jail; as some ill-advised people had 
uncoupled the merciless pack of the law at my heels. I had 
taken the last farewell of my few friends; my chest was on 
the road to Greenock; I had composed the last song I should 
ever measure in Caledonia, — 'The gloomy night is gathering 
fast/ when a letter from Dr. Blacklock to a friend of mine 
overthrew all my schemes, by opening new prospects to my 
poetic ambition. ' '— Burns, Letter to Moore, August 2, 1787. 

42,9 — "Farewell, my friends," etc. The second quatrain 
of the last stanza of "The Bonnie Banks of Ayr." Carlyle 
apparently quotes from memory. The last line should read — 
' i Farewell, the bonnie banks of Ayr. ■ ' 

42, 24 — "mockery king." From Shakespeare, "Bichard 
II," iv, i, 260. 

"0, that I were a mockery king of snow." 

42, 26— mad Rienzi. Cola di Eienzi (1313(?)-1354). An 
Italian patriot, a type of the unpractical political dreamer. 
In 1347, he led a successful revolution in Eome, introduced 
wise reforms, fell from power and was killed in a riot. 

42, 33— * ' It needs no effort, » ' etc. From Lockhart 's * ' Life 
of Burns," v, 130 f. 

43, 35 — "As for Burns," etc. From a letter of Sir Walter 
Scott's; Lockhart ? s "Life of Burns," v, 112-115. 

43, 36 — "Virgilium vidi tantum." "I only saw Virgil" 
— Ovid, Tristria, iv, x, 51. 

44, 7 — Professor Ferguson. Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), 
chaplain of the Black Watch at Fontenoy, professor of natu- 
ral philosophy (1759-1764) in the University of Edinburgh. 

44, 9 — Dugald Stewart. A Scottish philosopher (1753- 
1828), professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of 
Edinburgh. 

44, 26— Langhorne. John Langhorne (1735-1779), the 



84 NOTES 

poet, best known as the faithful translator, with his brother 
William, of Plutarch 's "Lives." 

44, 27 — "Justice of Peace." Scott's wonderful memory- 
is not quite exact here. The passage is from "The Country- 
Justice, " I. 

44, 36 — Nasmyth's picture. See frontispiece. 

45, 31 — in malam partem. Unfavorably, with prejudice. 

46, 7 — In his unexampled situation. Nearly all his biog- 
raphers take this attitude toward Burns 's Edinburgh visit, 
as if it were not the plowman who conferred the honor. 

46, 19 — jealous indignant fear. Lockhart writes, p. 124, 
"How perpetually he was alive to the dread of being looked 
down upon as a man, even by those who most zealously ap- 
plauded the works of his genius, might perhaps be traced 
through the whole sequence of his letter s. 7 ' See also ib., 
p. 125. 

46, 28— halt forever. Cf. I. Kings xvm, 21. 

46, 36— good old Blacklock. Thomas Blacklock (1721- 
1791), the blind poet, son of a bricklayer of Annan, educated 
for the ministry, retired early on an annuity, and kept a 
boarding-house for students in Edinburgh. See "Dictionary 
of National Biography, " s.v. Heron writes of him, ' l There 
was never, perhaps, one among all mankind whom you might 
more truly have called an angel upon earth than Dr. Black- 
lock. He was guileless and innocent as a child, yet endowed 
with manly sagacity and penetration. His heart was a 
perpetual spring of benignity. His feelings were all trem- 
blingly alive to the sense of the sublime, the beautiful, the 
tender, the pious, the virtuous. ' '—Lockhart, "Life of 
Burns,' ' 102. 

47, 4 — pudding and praise. A Popian tag Carlyle was 
fond of — 

"Poetic Justice, with her lifted scale, 
Where in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs, 
And solid pudding against empty praise." 

-—Pope, "The Dunciad," i, 52-4. 

47, 28 — lie at the pool. See John v, 2-7. 

48, 5 — "did not intend to borrow honour.' ' On one oc- 
casion, however, he takes a higher tone. "There is a certain 
stigma, " says he to Bishop Geddes, "in the name of Excise- 
man; but I do not intend to borrow honour from any pro- 
fession. > >— Lockhart, < < Life of Burns, > ' 197. 



NOTES 85 

48, 12— owed no man anything. ' * Burns was an honest 
man: after all his struggles, he owed no man a shilling when 
he died. ' '— Lockhart, "Life of Burns,' ' p. 292. 

48, 34 — Picturesque tourists. The incident is told in Lock- 
hart 's "Life of Burns, " p. 204. Stevenson thinks the inci- 
dent anything but " imaginary " ; his interpretation is inter- 
esting ; see ' ' Studies of Men and Books. ' ' 

49, 6— These men . . . were ... his ruin. "The four 
principal biographers of our poet, Heron, Currie, Walker, and 
Irving, concur in the general statement, that his moral course 
from the time when he settled in Dumfries was downwards. 
Heron knew more of the matter personally than any of the 
others, and his words are these: "In Dumfries his dissipa- 
tion became still more deeply habitual. He was here ex- 
posed more than in the country, to be solicited to share the 
riot of the dissolute and the idle. Foolish young men such 
as writers' apprentices, young surgeons, merchants' clerks 
and his brother excisemen, flocked eagerly about him, and 
from time to time pressed him to drink with them that they 
might enjoy his wicked wit. The Caledonian Club, too, and 
the Dumfries and Galloway Hunt, had occasional meetings 
in Dumfries after Burns came to reside there, and the poet 
was invited to share their hospitality, and hesitated not to 
accept their invitation." — Lockhart, "Life of Burns, " p. 207. 

50, 3— he comes in collision. This is the episode of the 
four carronades. On February 27, 1792, Burns, with other 
excisemen, captured a smuggling brig in the Solway. At the 
sale, he purchased four of her carronades and sent them as a 
present to the French Legislative Assembly. They were 
stopped at Dover and Burns was severely reprimanded by his 
"official Superiors." Burns was also imprudent in express- 
ing his sympathy with the French Eevolution. His letter to 
James Graham of Fintray, one of the five Commissioners of 
the Scottish Board of Excise, dated December, 1792, shows 
great distress of mind at the prospect of an inquiry into his 
political conduct. It appears that he had been dismissed 
but was restored through Mr. Graham's interest. See "Dic- 
tionary of National Biography. ' ' 

50, 26 — That painful class. Carlyle does not make allow- 
ance for the fact that Burns 's conduct, at this time, as ad- 
mitted by his apologists, was disreputable; that party feeling 
between Whigs and Tories ran very high; and that Burns 



86 NOTES 

seems to take the Whig, the unpatriotic, side. See Lockhart, 

pp. 211-222. 

51, 30 — man unmerciful to his brother. Possibly Carlyle 

may have had in mind Burns 'a lines from "Man was made 

to mourn, "— 

"Man's inhumanity to man 
Makes countless thousands mourn." 

51, 36— Ubi saeva indignatio, etc. "Where bitter wrath 
cannot rend his heart any further. " 

52, 4—* 'If he entered an inn.'' See Lockhart, 198. Car- 
lyle omits the end of the sentence: it runs, " round the ingle; 
the largest punch-bowl was produced; and 

'Be ours this night — who knows what comes to-morrow?' 

was the language of every eye in the circle that welcomed 
him." 

52, 11 — spurned all other reward. Not literally true. 
Burns contributed some sixty songs to Thomson's " Collection 
of Scottish Airs' ' and almost quarrelled with the editor for 
offering to pay him: still he accepted £5 at one time as well 
as several presents. On July 12, 1796, he wrote an agonized 
letter to Thomson requesting £5, which his friend sent him 
at once. Thomson has been criticized for not sending more. 
This order was found among Burns 's papers, after his 
death: it had not been presented. 

52, 17 — "thoughtless follies,' ' etc. From Burns 's "A 
Bard >s Epitaph. > • 

52, 21— poor sixpence a day. One editor explains that as 
referring to the poet's enlistment in the Dumfries Gentle- 
men Volunteers! Burns was fond of using imagery taken 
from military life. The passage Carlyle based this sentence 
on is from Lockhart, p. 168. "These have been six horrible 
weeks. Anguish and low spirits have made me unfit to read, 
write or think. I have a hundred times wished that one 
could resign life as an officer does a commission; for I would 
not take in any poor ignorant wretch by selling out. Lately 
I was a sixpenny private, and God knows a miserable soldier 
enough: now I march to the campaign a starving cadet, a 
little more conspicuously wretched. " The letter is dated 
Jan. 21, 1788, and addressed to Mrs. Dunlop. Burns 's ac- 
tion presented itself to Dr. Currie in this light. ' * In the year 






NOTES 87 



1795, the Editor of a London newspaper, high in its char- 
acter for literature and independence of sentiment, made a 
proposal to him, that he should furnish them once a week 
with an article for their poetical department, and receive 
from them a recompense of fifty-two guineas per annum, an 
offer which the pride of genius disdained to accept. Yet he 
had for several years furnished, and was at that time fur- 
nishing, the "Museum" of Johnson with his beautiful lyrics, 
without fee or reward, and was obstinately refusing all 
recompense to the greater work of Mr. Thomson, which the 
justice and generosity of that gentleman was pressing upon 
him."— Currie, I, 228 f., 1820. See also Lockhart, "Life of 
Burns/ ' 168. 

52, 34 — not medically informed. Lockhart discusses the 
medical aspect of the question, p. 256. A plowman, with 
great muscular strength, yet Burns suffered from "nerves,*' 
like any fine lady. 

53, 37 — two men . . . could hardly be found. Jeffrey 
made such an offer to Carlyle. See "Early Letters, " I, 120. 

54, 6 — close observer of manners. Probably Carlyle him- 
self. 

54, 8— "twice cursed." Parody of a line in Portia's 
speech— 

"The quality of mercy is not strained . . . 

It is twice bless'd; 

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes." 

— "Merchant of Venice," iv, i, 81-84. 

54, 28 — much was to be done. At this time, Dibdin, the 
writer of sea-songs, was receiving a pension of £200 from the 
government. 

55, 2 — poor promotion he desired. To be a supervisor and 
then collector of excise. "Towards the close of 1795 Burns 
was . . . employed as an acting supervisor of excise. This 
was apparently a step to a permanent situation of that 
higher and more lucrative class; and from thence, there is 
every reason to believe the kind patronage of Mr. Graham 
might elevate him farther yet. ' '—Lockhart, ' * Life of Burns, ' ' 
272. "If I were very sanguine, I might hope that some of 
my great patrons might procure me a treasury warrant for 
supervisor, surveyor-general, etc." — Burns to Moore, January 
4, 1789. 



88 NOTES 

55, 14— Cervantes. (1547-1616.) The author of "Don 
Quixote" was maimed in the battle of Lepanto; he wrote 
his greatest work in poverty; it brought him fame but no 
money; he found a patron only at the close of his life. — 
grapes of thorns. "Ye shall know them by their fruits. 
Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles ? M — Mat- 
thew, vii, 16. 

55, 16 — " nobility and gentry." Burns dedicated the 
" Edinburgh" edition of his poems "To the Noblemen and 
Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt." 

55, 18— " Scottish Bard," etc. From the dedication to 
the second edition of Burns, Edinburgh, 1787. "A Scottish 
bard, proud of the name, and whose highest ambition is to 
sing in his country 's service. ' ' 

55, 26 — wring their supplies . . . from the hard hand. 

"By heaven, I had rather coin my heart, 
And drop my blood for drachmas, than to wring 
From the hard hands of peasants their vile trash, 
By any indirection." 

— Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar," rv, iii, 72-76. 

55, 31 — little Babylons. Allusion to Nebuchadnezzar's 
boast, "Is not this great Babylon that I have built for the 
house of the kingdom, by the might of my power, and for 
the honour of my majesty! "— Daniel, iv, 30. 

56, 4 — "Love one another.' ' See I. John, in, 11. 

56, 5—* 'bear one another's burdens.' ' See Galatians, vi, 2. 

56, 16 — hunger and nakedness. Varied from Komans, 
vin, 35. 

56, 17 — poison-chalice. Allusion to the cup of hemlock 
juice that Socrates was forced to drink. The words are sug- 
gested by "Macbeth," I, vii, 11— "our poisoned chalice. M 

56, 23 — Roger Bacon. An English Franciscan (1214- 
1268), who did much for natural science. He was impris- 
oned in Paris as a magician, from about 1257 until 1267. — 
Galileo. Gallileo Gallilei (1564-1642), Italian astronomer, 
inventor of the telescope. Tried by the Inquisition for up- 
holding the Copernican theory. Milton visited him at Flor- 
ence during his Italian tour in 1638. 

56, 24 — Tasso. Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), famous Ital- 
ian poet, author of epic poem on the First Crusade called 
"Jerusalem Delivered." He was imprisoned for seven years 
by the Duke of Ferrara: he suffered from religious mania. 



NOTES 89 

56, 25 — Camoens. Luis de Camoens (1524-1580), the chief 
poet of Portugal. His great poem the "Lusiad" deals with 
the discovery of the sea-route to India. He died in a public 
hospital. 

56, 26 — * 'persecuted they." See Matthew, v, 12. 

57, 12 — Death . . . led it captive. Variation of phrase in 
Psalms, lxviii, 18, and Ephesians, iv, 8. 

57, 31— Restaurateur. "It is a damnable heresy in criti- 
cism to maintain either expressly or implicitly that the ulti- 
mate object of poetry is sensation. That of cookery is such, 
but not that of poetry. Sir Walter Scott is the great intel- 
lectual restaurateur of Europe."— -"Carlyle's Early Life," 
I, 386. 

58, 21— Locke ... a traitor. John Locke (1632-1704), 
the English philosopher, author of ' ' An Essay on the Human 
Understanding." In 1683, he was suspected of complicity 
in Shaftesbury's plots and was forced into exile in Holland, 
until the Kevolution of 1688. 

58, 24-— Milton rich. Maeaulay's famous essay on Milton 
was published in the "Edinburgh Eeview" in 1825. Carlyle 
may have had such a sentence as this in mind: "After hav- 
ing experienced every calamity which is incident to our 
nature, old, poor, sightless, and disgraced, he retired to his 
hovel to die." 

58, 25 — fallen from a height. 

"Into what pit thou seest, 
From what height fallen." 

— Milton, "Paradise Lost," I, 91 f. 

58, 26 — in darkness and with dangers. 

"more safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged, 
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days, 
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues, 
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round.'* 

— Milton, "Paradise Lost," vin, 24-27. 

58, 28 — fit audience though few. 

"Still govern thou my song, 
Urania, and fit audience find, though few." 

— Milton, "Paradise Lost," vin, 31 f. 

59, 8— "golden calf of Self-love." Unidentified. 
59, 10 — man's reasonable service. See Romans, xn, 1. 
59, 30— New and Old Light. See ante, note, 4, 22. 

59, 36— Rabelais. Francois Rabelais (1483-1553), the 



90 NOTES 



great French humorist, author of t i Gargantua ' ' and ' ' Panta- 
gruel." — "a great Perhaps." These often-quoted "last 
words' ' of Rabelais, "Je vais chercher un grand peut-etre, " 
are an invention. 

60, 8 — "independent." "I am bred to the plough and am 
independent." Dedication of Edinburgh edition of Burns, 
1787. 

60, 26— "I would not for much." "The poor Historical 
Professor, in this place, would not for much money, have had 
much money in his youth. "— Carlyle, "Jean Paul Friedrich 
Eichter," "Essays," n, 189. 

60, 27— Jean Paul. Jean Paul Friedrich Eichter (1763- 
1825), the greatest of German humorists. See Carlyle 's two 
essays on Eichter. 

60, 29— "The prisoner's allowance." "The prisoner's al- 
lowance," says he, "is bread and water; but I had only the 
latter."— Carlyle, "Jean Paul Friedrich Eichter," "Es- 
says," ii, 187. 

60, 32— "the canary-bird sings." "Fate manages poets, 
as men do singing-birds; you overhang the cage of the singer 
and make it dark, till at length he has caught the tunes you 
play to him, and can sing them rightly." — Carlyle, "Jean 
Paul Friedrich Eichter, " " Essays, ' ' n, 189. 

60, 38 — poetry and rich men's banquets. Burns himself 
writes: "Poverty! thou half-sister of death, thou cousin- 
german of hell! Oppressed by thee, the man of sentiment, 
whose heart glows with independence, and meits with sensi- 
bility, inly pines under the neglect, or writhes in bitterness 
of soul under the contumely of arrogant, unfeeling wealth. 
Oppressed by thee, the son of genius, whose ill-starred ambi- 
tion plants him at the tables of the fashionable and polite, 
must see, in suffering silence, his remark neglected, and his 
person despised, while shallow greatness, in his idiot attempts 
at wit, shall meet with countenance and applause. "—Lock- 
hart, "Life of Burns," p. 290. 

61, 8 — offender against certain rules. Like remaining cov- 
ered and sitting, when the National Anthem was sung, refus- 
ing to drink the health of Pitt, the prime minister, etc. 

61, 32 — "purchased a pocket-copy." In his letter to W. 
Nichol, dated Mauchline, June 18, 1787, Burns writes: "I 
have bought a pocket Milton, which I carry perpetually about 
with me, in order to study the sentiments — the dauntless mag- 




NOTES 91 

nanimity, the intrepid unyielding independence, the desperate 
daring, and noble defiance of hardship, in that great per- 
sonage, Satan." 

61, 33 — Byron's grand exemplar. In his preface to his 
"Vision of Judgment," Southey called the poetry of Byron 
and Shelley "the Satanic school' ' of poetry. 

62, 1 — serve God and Mammon. See Matthew vi, 24. 

62, 32 — "He who would write." Often, as here, mis- 
quoted. Milton's words are: "He who would not be frustrate 
of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought 
himself to be a true poem. "—"Apology for Smectymnuus. ' ' 
Prose Works, in, 118 (Bohn). 

63, 29 — Plebiscita. The decrees or ordinances of the peo- 
ple (in Roman usage), 

63, 36 — few inches of deflection. Carlyle distinguished 
himself at college by his ability in mathematics: be trans- 
lated Legendre's "Elements of Geometry," and in 1834 he 
applied for the professorship of Astronomy in Edinburgh 
University. 

64, 14 — Ramsgate, etc. Sea-port and popular resort in 
Kent. The Isle of Dogs, also known as Poplar Marshes, on 
the Thames, below London, where the King's hounds were 
formerly kept. 

64, 24 — Valclusa Fountain. Valla Chiusa, Vaucluse; near 
Avignon, celebrated by Petrarch. Alison thinks it owes its 
beauty to the fact that Petrarch resided there. On their 
famous elopement, Mr. and Mrs. Browning turned aside to 
visit it. Browning carried his wife out to a rock in the 
middle of the stream, while Flush barked from the bank. 




APPENDIX I 

ON THE STUDY OF CARLYLE'S "BURNS" 

First. This is a piece of English literature, which must 
be read carefully and understood. The meaning resides 
in the words; many of which, especially those in Scottish, 
cannot be understood without much turning over of the 
leaves of dictionaries, such as the Century, the Standard, 
the International, the new Oxford. For the Scottish 
words, the best authority is Jamieson; though Burns's 
words will be found also in the Oxford Dictionary as far 
as issued. This spade-work must not be neglected, or the 
pupils will have vague and imperfect ideas as to what it 
is all about. The notes provide the needed information 
which is not readily accessible in lexicons and encyclo- 
pedias. 

Then it is to be studied. The preliminary rapid read- 
ing (if possible, aloud and in turn, with questionings by 
the teacher, explanations of the words by the pupils) is 
only clearing the ground. The essay may be considered 
as:— 

(a) The review of a book, viz., Lockhart's "Life of 
Burns." Is it a review? Does the essay give us an idea 
of the nature, extent, character, defects and excellences of 
Lockhart's memoir? What judgment does Carlyle pass 
upon it, as compared with others? Is the review of Lock- 
hart's memoir the main purpose of the essay? or is it 
soon estimated and dismissed, and the rest of the essay 
devoted to an exposition of Carlyle's (not Lockhart's) 
views of Burns's life, character and poetry? 

(b) An article intended to convey information. What 
information (definite and connected) does it convey re- 
garding (1) Burns's life? (2) Burns's character? (3) 
Burns' s production, amount, kind, quality? (4) What is 
good, bad, indifferent, likeable, detestable in his work? 

93 



94 APPENDIX I 

We want information. Does Carlyle give or does he with- 
hold it? Or does he assume that the reader has this infor- 
mation in common with himself and discuss it with him? 
See Subjects for Essays I. and II. 

(c) A piece of narrative-exposition not intended to 
convey definite and full information regarding the pre- 
cise value of Lockhart's book or the details of Burns's 
life and work, but to set before the reader Carlyle's own 
thoughts on Burns's life and work and if possible win 
him into admiration of his hero. Is its aim to advance 
Carlyle's personal opinions or to set Burns in his true 
light? Regard the essay as an argument for the de- 
fendant. 

(d) An essay. Compare with one of Macaulay's 
(essay on Milton), or Stevenson's, or Lamb's, or Bacon's, 
or Addison's, just to show what different ideas different 
writers have of the essay, as to length, treatment, style, 
etc. Pupils might read these and bring summaries into 
class; or the teacher might read and explain enough of 
each specimen essay to make the differences clear. It will 
help the pupils to remember the substance of the essay, 
and it will aid them in planning their own compositions, 
if they make analyses (say three) of it. First, a brief 
summary of a couple of paragraphs or so, after the first 
reading at home; next, a series of brief pithy phrases 
giving the substance of each paragraph; and finally, a 
more elaborate outline of the whole ; giving each paragraph 
several phrases, marking and naming the main divisions 
of the topic, etc. Carlyle's Summary (Appendix II.) will 
furnish useful hints. 



SUBJECTS FOR ESSAYS 

I. A LIFE OF BURNS. 

Note. This should, of course, be based solely on the 
essay. No other authority should be read or consulted. 
The pupil should try to glean such facts as the dates of 



STUDY OF CARLYLE'S "BURNS" 95 

his birth, marriage, death, the nature of his education, 
various callings, etc. The results will be vague and scanty, 
but it will show the class the difference between an article 
in an encyclopedia, which is intended primarily to convey 
definite information, and an essay proper, which assumes 
a common ground of knowledge on which the reader and 
the writer meet, and which has, for its main object, to 
cast new light on these matters of common knowledge. 

II. A HISTORY OF BURNS'S POETRY. 

Note. As before, try to get from the essay, the titles 
of poems, the dates of editions, the order in which they 
were produced, etc. The results again will be scanty; 
but it ought to show pupils how little is the definite in- 
formation they can extract from an essay of this kind. 
It should further impel them to make good this deficiency, 
by reading some good encyclopedia article on Burns, or 
such a book as Lockhart's, or the life of Burns in the 
English Men of Letters series. To realize how little we 
know is the first (and last) stage of education. 

III. THE FIVE LYRICS. 

The pupils should read for themselves the five lyrics 
of Burns given in Appendix IV and mentioned by Car- 
lyle on page 32, as illustrating the "immense variety ," of 
Burns's subjects. Then they should compare their ideas 
with those expressed by Carlyle. It does not matter 
whether they agree or disagree with him in their final es- 
timate, so long as they discuss the matter fully. A use- 
ful exercise would be to make a list of Burns's poems as 
given by Carlyle, and then correct it by filling out the 
exact titles as given in any standard edition. 

iv. carlyle's view of burns's genius. 

Collect and condense the different passages in the essay 
that deal with its strength and its limitations. Decide if 
Carlyle rates Burns too high. 



96 APPENDIX I 

V. THE PERSONAL CHARACTER OF BURNS. 

Its strength, its weakness,— in his relation to father, 
mother, wife, children, society. Decide if Carlyle exag- 
gerates his merits and slurs over his faults. Compare, if 
possible, Stevenson's estimate of Burns, in "Men and 
Books." 

VI. THE SCOTTISH CHARACTER OF BURNS'S POETRY. 

In (a) language, (b) subjects, (c) as compared with 
the smooth, colorless, non-national literature which pre- 
ceded it. All given in the essay. Could the subjects have 
been found elsewhere? 

VII. BURNS'S POLITICS. 

Suggestive questions:— Was Burns in sympathy with 
the principles of the French Revolution? How did he 
manifest his practical sympathy with them? What were 
the consequences to himself? Is the saying, "A man's a 
man for a' that," commonplace and meaningless? 

VIII. BURNS AND RELIGION. 

His intervention in religious controversy gives him first 
local fame. His scourging of hypocrisy {Holy Willy, 
Holy Fair, etc.). His reverence for real religion ("Cot- 
ter's Saturday Night"). Carlyle's view that for Burns, 
religion was made impossible by the age in which he lived. 
Is this correct ? Were there two Burnses ? How could the 
same fountain send out sweet water and bitter? How 
far did Burns's own personal conflict with the discipline 
of the Kirk influence his views? 

IX. THE ESSAY JUDGED. 

Is it interesting or not? Honestly? Give reasons 
why, for or against. Does it make Burns interesting? 
As a man? As a poet? Does it make us respect, ad- 
mire, pity him? Does it make us want to read his poetry? 
Is it a success or a failure ? 



APPENDIX II 

CARLYLE'S SUMMARY. 

(•'Essays," 1, 483.) 

Our grand maxim of supply and demand. Living misery 
and posthumous glory. The character of Burns a theme 
that cannot easily become exhausted. His Biographers. 
Perfection in Biography (p. 6). 

Burns one of the most considerable British men of the 
eighteenth century: An age the most prosaic Britain had 
yet seen. His hard and most disadvantageous conditions. 
Not merely as a poet, but as a man, that he chiefly in- 
terests and affects us. His life a deeper tragedy than 
any brawling Napoleon's. His heart, erring and at length 
broken, full of inborn riches, of love to all living and 
lifeless things. The Peasant Poet bears himself among 
the low, with whom his lot is cast, like a King in 
exile (10). 

His writings but a poor mutilated fragment of what 
was in him, yet of a quality as enduring as the English 
tongue. He wrote, not from hearsay, but from sight and 
actual experience. This, easy as it looks, the fundamental 
difficulty which all poets have to strive with. Byron, 
heartily as he detested insincerity, far enough from fault- 
less. No poet of Burns's susceptibility from first to last 
so totally free from affectation. Some of his letters, how- 
ever, by no means deserve this praise. His singular 
power of making all subjects, even the most homely, in- 
teresting. Wherever there is a sky above him and a world 
around him, the poet is in his place. Every genius an 
impossibility till he appears (18). 

Burns's earnest, rugged truth, yet tenderness and sweet 
native grace. His clear graphic "descriptive touches" and 

97 



98 APPENDIX II 

piercing emphasis of thought. Professor Stewart's testi- 
mony to Burns's intellectual vigor. A deeper insight than 
any "doctrine of association." In the poetry of Burns, 
keenness of insight keeps pace with keenness of feeling. 
Loving indignation and good hatred: "Scots wha hae" ; 
"Macpherson's Farewell"; sunny, buoyant floods of Hu- 
mor (28). 

Imperfections of Burns's poetry: "Tarn o' Shanter" 
not a true poem so much as a piece of sparkling rhetoric ; 
"The Jolly Beggars," the most complete and perfect as a 
poetical composition. His songs the most truly inspired 
and most deeply felt of all his poems. His influence on 
the hearts and literature of his country: Literary patri- 
otism (33). 

Burns's acted works even more interesting than his 
written ones; and these too, alas, but a fragment. His 
passionate youth never passed into clear and steadfast 
manhood. The only true happiness of a man : often it is 
the greatest minds that are latest in obtaining it. Burns 
and Byron. Burns's hard- worked, yet happy, boyhood. 
His estimable parents. Early dissipations. In Necessity 
and Obedience a man should find his highest Free- 
dom (40). 

Religious quarrels and scepticisms. Faithlessness; ex- 
ile and blackest desperation. Invited to Edinburgh : A 
Napoleon among the crowned sovereigns of Literature. 
Sir Walter Scott's reminiscence of an interview with 
Burns. Burns's calm, manly bearing amongst the Edin- 
burgh aristocracy. His bitter feeling of his own indigence. 
By the great he is treated in the customary fashion; and 
each party goes his several way (47). 

What Burns was next to do, or to avoid; his Excise and 
Farm scheme not an unreasonable one; no failure of ex- 
ternal means, but of internal, that overtook Burns. Good 
beginnings. Patrons of genius and picturesque tourists: 
their moral rottenness, by which he became infected, grad- 
ually eat out the heart of his life. Meteors of French 
Politics rise before him, but they are not his stars. Cal- 



CARLYLE'S SUMMARY 99 

umny is busy with him. The little great-folk of Dum- 
fries; Burns's desolation. In his destitution and degra- 
dation one act of self-devotedness still open to him; not 
as a hired soldier, but as a patriot, would he strive for the 
glory of his country. The crisis of his life; Death 
(pp. 52, 53). 

Little effectual help could perhaps have been rendered 
to Burns; patronage twice cursed; many a poet has been 
poorer, none prouder. And yet much might have been 
done to have made his humble atmosphere more genial. 
Little Babylons and Babylonians; let us go and do other- 
wise. The market price of Wisdom. Not in the power of 
any mere external circumstances to ruin the mind of a 
man. The errors of Burns to be mourned over, rather 
than blamed. The great want of his life was the great 
want of his age,_a true faith in Religion and a singleness 
and unselfishness of aim (59). Poetry, as Burns could 
and ought to have followed it, is but another name of Wis- 
dom, of Religion. For his culture as a poet, poverty and 
much suffering for a season were absolutely advantageous. 
To divide his hours between poetry and rich men's ban- 
quets an ill-starred attempt. Byron, rich in worldly 
means and honors, no whit happier than Burns in his 
poverty and worldly degradation: They had a message 
from on High to deliver, which could leave them no rest 
while it remained unaccomplished. Death and the rest of 
the grave. A stern moral, twice told us in our own time. 
The world habitually unjust in its judgment of such men. 
With men of right feeling anywhere, there will be no need 
to plead for Burns: in pitying admiration he lies en- 
shrined in all our hearts (64). 

LOfC 



APPENDIX III 
POEMS BY ROBERT BURNS 



0, WILLIE BREW'D A PECK 0' MAUT 



0, Willie brew'd a peck o' maut, 
And Rob and Allan cam to see; 

Three blither hearts, that lee lang night, 
Ye wad na find in Christendie. 

CHORUS 

We are na fou, we ? re na that foil, 
But just a drappie in our e'e; 

The cock may craw, the day may daw, 
And aye we ? 11 taste the barley bree. 

II 

Here are we met, three merry boys, 

Three merry boys, I trow, are we; 

And mony a night we ? ve merry been, 
And mony mae we hope to be ! 

hi 

It is the moon— I ken her horn, 

That 's blinkm' in the lift sae hie ; 
100 






POEMS BY ROBERT BURNS 101 

She shines sae bright to wile us hame, 
But, by my sooth, she '11 wait a wee! 

IV 

Wha first shall rise to gang awa', 

A cuckold, coward loon is he! 
Wha last beside his chair shall fa', 

He is the king amang us three! 

CHORUS 

We are na f ou, we 're na that f ou, 
But just a drappie in our e'e; 

The cock may craw, the day may daw, 
And aye we '11 taste the barley bree. 



TO MARY IN HEAVEN 



Thou ling'ring star, with lessening ray, 

That lov'st to greet the early morn, 
Again thou usher'st in the day 

My Mary from my soul was torn. 
O Mary, dear departed shade! 

Where is thy place of blissful rest? 
See'st thou thy lover lowly laid? 

Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast ? 

ii 

That sacred hour can I forget? 

Can I forget the hallowed grove, 
Where by the wandering Ayr we met 

To live one day of parting love? 



102 APPENDIX III 

Eternity will not efface 

Those records dear of transports past; 
Thy image at our last embrace; 

Ah ! little thought we 't was our last ! 



in 

Ayr, gurgling, kiss'd his pebbled shore, 

O'erhung with wild woods, thickening green; 
The fragrant birch, and hawthorn hoar, 

Twin'd am'rous round the raptur'd scene; 
The flow'rs sprang wanton to be prest, 

The birds sang love on every spray- 
Till too, too soon, the glowing west 

Proclaim' d the speed of winged day. 



IV 

Still o'er these scenes my mem'ry wakes, 

And fondly broods with miser care! 
Time but the impression stronger makes, 

As streams their channels deeper wear. 
My Mary, dear departed shade! 

Where is thy place of blissful rest? 
See'st thou thy lover lowly laid? 

Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast? 



AULD LANG SYNE 



Should auld acquaintance be forgot, 
And never brought to min'? 

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, 
And days o' lang syne? 



POEMS BY ROBERT BURNS 103 

CHORUS 
For auld lang syne, my dear, 

For auld lang syne, 
We '11 tak a cup o* kindness yet, 

For auld lang syne. 

II 
V*We twa hae run about the braes, 
And pu'd the gowans fine; 
V^feut we Ve wandered mony a weary foot, 

*v Sin' auld lang syne. 

if 

in 

We twa hae paidPt \ J the burn, 

Frae mornm' sun till dine; 
But seas between us braid hae roar'd 

Sin' auld lang syne. 

IV 

And here 's a hand, my trusty fere, 

And gie 's a hand o' thine; 
And we ? 11 tak a right gude-willie waught, 1 

For auld lang syne. 

v 

And surely ye '11 be your pint-stowp, 

And surely I '11 be mine; 
And we '11 tak a cup o' kindness yet 

For auld lang syne. 

CHORUS 

For auld lang syne, my dear, 

For auld lang syne, 
We '11 tak a cup o* kindness yet, 

For auld lang syne! 

1 A draught in token of good will. The usual reading ' 'gude-willie waught" 
is nonsense. 



104 APPENDIX III 

DUNCAN GRAY 

i 

Duncan Gray cam' here to woo, 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't, 
On blythe Yule night when we were foil, 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 
Maggie coost her head f u' high, * / 
Looked asklent and unco skeigh, 
Gart poor Duncan stand abeigh; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 

II 
Duncan fleech'd, and Duncan pray'd, 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't; 
Meg was deaf as Ailsa craig, 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 
Duncan sighed baith out and in, 
Grat his een baith bleer't and blin', 
Spak' o' lowpin o'er a linn; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 

in 

Time and chance are but a tide; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't ; 
Slighted love is sair to bide; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 
Shall I, like a fool, quoth he, 
For a haughty hizzie die ? 
She may gae to — France, for me ! 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 

rv 

How it comes let doctors tell; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't; 
Meg grew sick— as he grew heal; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 



POEMS BY ROBERT BURNS 105 

Something in her bosom wrings, 
For relief a sigh she brings; 
And 0, her een, they spak sic things! 
Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 



Duncan was a lad o' grace; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't; 
Maggie's was a piteous case; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 
Duncan couldna be her death, 
Swelling pity smoor'd his wrath; 
Now they 're crouse and canty baith; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 



BRUCE'S ADDRESS TO HIS ARMY AT 
BANNOCKBURN 

i 

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled, 
Scots, wham Bruce has often led; 
Welcome to your gory bed, 
Or to victorie ! 

II 

Now 's the day, and now 's the hour; 
See the front o' battle lour; 
See approach proud Edward's pow'r — 
Chains and slaverie. 

in 

Wha will be a traitor-knave? 
Wha can fill a coward's grave? 
Wha sae base as be a slave? 
Let him turn and flee ! 



106 APPENDIX III 



IV 



Wha for Scotland's king and law, 
Freedom's sword will strongly draw; 
Free-man stand, or Free-man fa'? 
Let him follow me ! 



By Oppression's woes and pains! 
By your sons in servile chains ! 
We will drain our dearest veins, 
But they shall be free ! 

VI 

Lay the proud usurpers low! 
Tyrants fall in every foe! 
Liberty 's in every blow!— 
Let us do— or die! 



THE BANKS OF DOON 

(First Version) 



Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon, 

How can ye be sae fair; 
How can ye chant, ye little birds, 

And I sae f u' o' care ! 

ii 

Thou '11 break my heart, thou bonnie bird, 

That sings upon the bough; 
Thou minds me o' the happy days 

When my f ause love was true. 



POEMS BY ROBERT BURNS 



107 



in 



Thou '11 break my heart, thou bonnie bird, 

That sings beside thy mate; 
For sae I sat, and sae I sang, 

And wist na o' my fate. 



IV 



Aft hae I rov'd by bonnie Doon, 
To see the woodbine twine, 

And ilka bird sang o' its love; 
And sae did I o' mine. 



Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose, 
Frae off its thorny tree; 

And my f ause lover staw the rose, 
But left the thorn wi' me. 



INDEX TO NOTES 



iEolian harp, 69 

JEschylus, "Eumenides," 76 

Addison, Joseph, ''Spectator," 79 

Alison, A., 75 

"Arabian Nights," 82 

Aristotle, 68 

Arnold, Matthew, 70, 72 

Ascham, Roger, "The Scholemas- 

... ter," 79 

Bacon, Sir Francis, 75 ; "The Ad- 
vancement of Learning," 78 

Bacon, Roger, 88 

Ballantyne, Provost, 74 

Batteux, Charles, 80 

Birkbeck, Morris, 67 

Blacklock, Dr. Thomas, 81, 83, 84 

Borgia, Csesar, 72 

Boston, Thomas, "Fourfold State," 
79 

Boynton, H. W., 67 

Browning, Mr. and Mrs., 91 

Browning, Mrs. E. B., "Aurora 
Leigh," 71 

Buchanan, George, 80 

Bulwer-Lytton, "Pelham," 71 

Burns, Gilbert, 77, 81 

Burns, Mrs., 66 

Burns, Robert, "Address to the 
Deil," 76; "Answer to Verses," 
81; "A Bard's Epitaph," 69, 
86; "The Bonnie Banks of 
Ayr," 73; "The Brigs of Ayr," 
73; "Cotter's Saturday Night," 
81, 82; "Dweller in Yon Dun- 
geon," 76; "Epistle to Davie," 
70; "Epistle to John Lapraik," 
68; "Farmer's Commendation," 
74; "Holy Willie's Prayer," 77; 
"Jessie," 79; "Jolly Beggars," 
77, 78; Letter to John Graham 
of Fintrav, 85 ; Letter to Dr. 
Moore, 66, 75, 81, 82, 83, 87; 
Letter to W. Nichol, 90; "Mac- 
pherson's Farewell," 77; "To a 
Mountain Daisy," 68; "Open 
the Door to Me, Oh!" 74; "To 
a Mouse," 68: "To W. Simp- 
son," 74; "The Twa Dogs," 
73: "A Winter's Night," 76; 
"Wounded Hare," 72 

Burns, William, 72 

Butler, Samuel, "Hudibras," 65 

Byron, Lord, 70, 91 



Cacus, 77 

Caesar, Julius, 81 

Caledonian Hunt, 66 

Camoens, Luis de, 89 

Carlyle, Thomas, "Essays," 71 ; 
"Jean Paul Friedrich Richter," 
90; "Heroes and Hero-Wor- 
ship," 70, 71, 75; "Sartor Re- 
sartus," 80 

"Carlyle's Early Life," 89 

"Catholic Dictionary," 73, 81 

de Catinat, Marshal, 65 

de Cervantes, Miguel, "Don Qui- 
xote," 88 

"Clarinda," 70 

Coleridge, S. T., 71 

a Combe, John, 65 

Constable, Archibald, 66 

Constable's "Miscellany," 66 

Cooper, J. F., "Leather-stocking 
Tales," 71 

de Cornuel, Mde., 65 

Cowper, William, 72 

Coyl Water, 73 

Crockford's, 72 

Cromek, R. H., "Reliques of 
Robert Burns," 67, 68, 69, 75 

Cunningham, Allan, "Life of 
Burns," 74, 82 

Currie, James, M.D., 65, 66, 70, 
73, 81, 85, 86, 87; "Dedica- 
tion," 77; "Prefatory Re- 
marks," 77 



Daniel, 88 

Dante Alighieri, 73 

Delphi, 71 

Dibdin, Charles, 87 

Dictionary of National Biography, 

84, 85 
Dow, J., 66, 70, 74, 76, 79 
Dumfries Aristocracy, 66 
Dunlop. Mrs. F. W., 69, 70, 75, 86 



"Edinburgh Review," 67, 69, 75, 

89 
Emerson, R. W„ 68 
Epistle to the Ephesians, 89 
Epistle to the Galatians, 88 
Epistle I. John. 88 
Epistle to tne Romans, 88 
Excise Commissioners, 66 



109 



110 



INDEX TO NOTES 



Ferguson, Professor Adam, 83 

Fergusson, Robert, 67 

Fleming, "Vocabulary of Philoso- 
phy," 81 

Fletcher, John, "Beggar's Bush," 
78 

Fletcher of Saltoun, 79 

"Fraser's Magazine," 71 

Gallileo Gallilei, 88 

Garpal, the, 73 

Gay, John, "Beggars' Opera," 78 

Gibson, Mrs., 78 

Glenbuck, 74 

Glencairn, Earl of, 66 

Glover, Richard, 79 

Gospel of John, 84 

Gospel of Matthew, 88, 89, 91 

Graham, Robert, 66 

Gray, Thomas, 79 

Greenock, 73 

Halloween, 72 

Heron, Robert, 65, 84, 85 

Holy Fair, 73 

Homer, "Iliad," 74 

Horace, 70; "Odes," 74 

Hume, David, 80; "Natural His- 
tory of Religion," 81; "Treatise 
of Human Nature," 80 

Hydaspes, 74 

Irving, David, 65, 85 
Isaiah, 83 

Jeffrey, Francis, 67, 69, 72, 75, 

87 
Johnson, Samuel, 76; "Rambler," 

79; "Rasselas," 79, 81 
Jubilee, 73 
Juvenal, "Satires," 76 

Karnes, Lord, 80 
Keats, John, 72, 75 
Kings, I., 84 
Knights of the Cross, 71 

Lamb, Charles, 71 

Lang, Andrew, 67, 70 

Langhorne, John, 83 

Laurie, Dr. Thomas, 81 

Light, New and Old, 66, 89 

Limbo, 79 

Locke, John, 89 

Lockhart, J. G., "Life of Burns," 

65, 66, 67, 75, 78, 83, 84, 85, 

86, 87, 90 
Lowe, Sir Hudson, 68 
Lucy, Sir Thomas, 65 
Lugar, the, 73 
Luther, Martin, 72 



de Mably, G. B., 80 

Macaulay, T. B., "Essay on Mil- 
ton," 89 

Machiavelli, Niccolo, "II Prin- 
cipe," 72 

Mars, Son of, 78 

Mauchline, 72, 78 

Milton, John, 88; "L' Allegro," 71; 
"Apology for Smectymnuus," 91 ; 
"II Penseroso," 77; "The Rea- 
son of Church Government," 
78; "Paradise Lost," 71, 89; 
Sonnet XXII, 82 

Minerva Press, 71 

de Montaigne, Michel, 65 

Montesquieu, C. de S., "L'Esprit 
des Lois," 80 

Mossgiel, 72 

Murdoch, John, 82 

Musaus,*J. K. A., 77 

Nasmyth, Alexander, 84 

Oliphant, Mrs. M., "Literary 

History," 72 
Ovid, "Fasti," 77; "Tristia," 83 
"Oxford English Dictionary," 80 

Paul, Rev. Hamilton, "Life of 

Burns," 65 
Peter kin, Alexander, 65 
Petrarch, Francesco, 91 
Piozzi, Mrs., "Anecdotes," 76 
Pope, A., "The Dunciad," 84 
Poussin, Nicholas, 74 
Propaganda, 81 
Psalms, 69, 89 

Quesnay, F., 80 

Rabelais, Francois, 90 

Racine, J. B., "Phedre," 
"Athalie," 80 

Ramsay, Allan, 67, 68 

Retzsch, F. A. M., 73 

Richter, J. P. F., 90 

de Rienzi, Cola, 83 

Robertson, William, "History of 
Charles V," "History of Amer- 
ica," 80 

Ruskin, John, "Modern Painters," 
74 

Saracens, 71 

Schisms, 79, 80 

Scott, Walter, 77, 78, 84, 89; 
"Lay of the Last Minstrel," 80 

Shakespeare, William, 65, 66, 75; 
"Henry V," 82; "Julius Cae- 
sar," 88; "King Lear," 76; 
"Macbeth," 88; "Richard II," 
83 



INDEX TO NOTES 



111 



Shelley, P. B., 91 

Signet, Writers to the, 66 

Smith, Adam, "Wealth of Na- 
tions," 80 

Smollett, Tobias, 72 

Socrates, 88 

Sophocles, 69 

Southey, R., 91 

Sterne, Laurence, "Sentimental 
Journey," 72; "Tristram Shan- 
dy," 76 

Stevenson, R. L., "Studies of Men 
and Books," 85 

Stewart, Dugald, 75, 83 

Swinburne, A. C, 70 

Syme, Robert, 76 

Tarbolton, 72 

Tasso, Torquato, 88 

Teniers, David, 78 

Tennyson, Alfred, 77; "Gareth 

and Lynette," 74; "In Memo- 

riam," 82 
Thebes, 77 



Theocritus, 73 

Thomson, George, 79; "Collection 
of Scottish Airs," 86 

Thomson, James, "Castle of Indo- 
lence," 68 

Tieck, Ludwig, 77 

Trent, Council of, 73 

University of St. Andrews, 67; of 
Edinburgh, 83, 91; of Glasgow, 
80 

Vates, 71 

Virgil, 83 

Virgins of the Sun, 71 

Voltaire, 80 

Walker, Josiah W., 65, 66, 85 

Wallace, Sir William, 75 

Wordsworth, William, 67; "Reso- 
lution and Independence," 82; 
"Song at the Feast of Brougham 
Castle," 67 



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